Monthly Archives: August 2017

More Devil’s Dictionary

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A couple of months ago this post generated a ton of suggestions. It seems like a worthy project, as our rulers keep producing new words and phrases to fool us. In the fullness of time, someone is going to write a book on how marketing techniques infiltrated the minds of our rulers, like a virus, causing them to increasingly rely on cheap marketing gags to communicate to themselves and the rest of us. The result being a ruling elite that sounds like commercials for laundry soap.

With that in mind, here are some new additions to the list.

Show your support: This is always a demand from a company or organization for you to buy their stuff so they can spend the proceeds on themselves, while taking credit for some good deed. Currently, retail chains are having their cashiers harass customers into giving money to the Red Cross for hurricane relief in Houston. The end result will be a photo-op of the executives posing with the Red Cross, handing them a big check, so they can claim to be supporting the community.

Inclusivity: The rallying cry of modern terrorism. Every organization that is about to be assaulted by tackle-faced social justice warriors gets a committee on inclusivity. This a place where lunatics plot to destroy the organization. Google started one of these and is now in free fall. Node.js is the most recent to be attacked by the ISIS of the West.

Affirming: Lesbians and middle-aged cat ladies are riddled with self-doubt, because they chose a lifestyle that is at odds with human biology. This leads them to create organizations, usually within other organizations, which are designed to tell them that they made the right choice, even if nature says otherwise. Protestant churches have all become affirming as they embrace every anti-Christian lunacy.

Brave: The Progressive religion is built around the concept of the struggle. Prog loonies all imagine themselves as paladins fighting the monster called fascism. Therefore, anyone who sallies forth into the public square to preach the good word is called brave. The irony is that it is safe. Antifa is called brave, while the people they are beating with clubs are called cowards.

That is not who we are: This is one of those phrases that is not intended for the wider audience. It is almost always said by a so-called Conservative in reaction to something normal people are doing. The person saying it is trying to signal to The Hive that they are not associated with the bad thing in question. When Paul Ryan says to his voters, “This is not who we are” he literally means he is not one of the dirt people in his district.

Send a message: This is another code word that people in The Hive use in public, but it is not intended for the public. When a politician talks about “sending a message” he means to signal his virtue to the rest of The Hive. The message to the rest of us, if any, is that the person saying it should probably be hurled into the ocean before she gets us killed.

Problematic: This is a favorite of Prog loonies. It means the speech or act in question could be ruled heretical. The problem is they lack the words to condemn it and an easy escape route to run away from it.

Troubling: This is the same as problematic.

Vibrant: This is a favorite term to mean no white people. A neighborhood is vibrant when it is full of boarded up houses and gang-bangers with pit bulls.

Sustainable: This is one of those words that should be included in the humor section, but the people who coined it have no sense of humor. Anything that is labeled “sustainable’ is always something that is not sustainable. Alternatively, it may be sustainable, like organic farming, but will require a great die off of humans. Whenever you hear this word, assume the person using it fantasizes about putting you in an oven.

Accepted: This is when some outlier or fringe population forces the majority to forgo its own preferences for those of the outlier or fringe population.

Passion: This is what happens to Progressive white women in the modern era. They are suddenly gripped with passion. Like Hitler, whose passion for killing Jews was all consuming, passionate women are obsessed with killing erections. Passionate women are always wildly unattractive and ear-piercingly obnoxious.

Growth: This is always used in economic debates to signal that something is good for rich people. A pro-growth policy is one that allows the rich to hoover up more money from the middle-class. When pundits accuse a politician of promoting polices that will hurt growth, it means the billionaire who owns the pundit is vexed with the politician.

Toxic: Any argument or fact that can be screamed away, because it is obviously true, is called toxic. The users of this word believe that the magic of their incantations will make the dis-confirming thing go away. Normal men being normal in public, for example, is branded as “toxic masculinity.” White people not robbing liquor stores or shooting one another over sneakers is “toxic racism.”

Sharable: This describes something that appears to be free but is used by the true owner to harm others or steal their property. Progs call doxing, for example, a sharable strategy. Tech companies like sharable technology because it means they get to install their spyware on your phone or computer.

Dialogue: This is when a Prog loony screams at you and you sit and take it. You are having a dialogue! If you refuse to put up with the lecture, then you are being divisive and polarizing, which is both troubling and problematic. It means you could be suffering from toxic racism.

The Corrupt Midget

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News brings word that the pint sized pundit, Ben Shapiro, is going to Berkeley to give another speech. Judging by his twitter activity, he is hoping it will attract Antifa and be shut down by the city. It is hard to know exactly. He could also be playing it the other way, hoping the event goes off without a problem. That way, he can blame the growing army to his right for the recent crackdown of speech by our masters. Like all of the boys and girls who color inside the lines, Shapiro needs to believe safety is a virtue.

Either way, this stunt is just that, a stunt to draw attention to himself, as well as an effort to re-establish his brand of Progressive punditry, as the extreme edge of acceptable. Calling Shapiro a Progressive may strike some people as weird, but that is the truth of it. He embraces all of the blank slate arguments of the Left. He takes, as a given, that the Left’s moral framework is the default for society. You see that in his twitter rants about the alt-right. Shapiro is a man of the Left, just the lagging edge of it.

Shapiro is also a notorious pen for hire, a guy who will say anything if you write a big enough check. He used to say nice things about Trump and the issues that Trump is now championing. Then the Wilks brothers hired him to be an anti-Trump loon, so he went full-on NeverTrump last year. Now that there is money to be made on the Trump train, Shapiro and all the other faux right-wing grifters have gotten on-board with Trump. One gets the sense that if Antifa writes him a check, he could be persuaded to support communism.

Of course, as that Charles Johnson piece reminds us, Shapiro was in on the Michelle Fields hoax a year ago. For those who have forgotten, she claimed to have been assaulted by a Trump campaign staffer at an event. Shapiro and several other fake conservatives demanded Trump quit the campaign over it. Shapiro even quit Breitbart over it, coincidentally just when the Wilks brothers check cleared. Video later revealed that the staffer in question merely brushed past Fields and she had been lying.

That is the thing about our chattering classes. They are never called to answer for their perfidy. Fields still gets on TV as a pundit, despite having been exposed as something of a sociopath. Shapiro was never pressed to explain his role in that affair. National Review is happy to give him a platform, as no doubt the Wilks brothers are stroking checks to them too. There’s little doubt that Sloppy Williamson was paid to write those insane anti-Trump columns last year. Even by his standards, they were a cornucopia of crack-pottery.

Since Charlottesville, Shapiro has been taking every opportunity to condemn the alt-right and you see that in the linked twitter rant. The game he is playing is the moral equivalence strategy. He keeps equating the alt-right with Antifa, comparing what you do not see, with what you do see. People hear about the alt-right, but they see black clad lunatics toppling over statues and smashing windows in street riots. Chad and Stacey out in the suburbs can be forgiven for confusing the two and condemning both.

That is the role guys like Shapiro play for the Left. These so-called conservatives happily define the boundaries between what is and what is not acceptable on the Right. He and his fellow pens-for-hire are the palace guard, defining the outer boundary of the political Right. It is why they are more worked up over the alt-right than the violent left-wing mobs of Antifa. The former is a real threat to their position, while the latter is good for selling books no one will read and building their media brand.

The other angle Shapiro is working is the flattery fraud. He invests a lot of time and effort in presenting himself as the thinking man’s right-winger. That in itself reveals something about him. His appeal is that smart normies can feel like intellectuals because they listen to Ben Shapiro. The fact that he can say he supports free speech and in the same thread condemn the speech of everyone to his Right reveals him to be a pseudo-intellectual moral nullity. He is an obsequious rumpswab, who will say anything for a dollar.

It is just another example of the corruption of the Official Right™. They may as well be actors, hired by the Left to play a role in the Prog political drama. They will never bite the hand that feeds them. It is why they are falling all over themselves to signal to the Left that they are perfectly OK with cracking down on dissident speech. It is not about ideology. It is about the paycheck. If the boundary of the Right gets pushed out, guys like Shapiro are no longer useful. It is why their guns are always pointed at us, rather than the Left.

Alt-Jew

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Someone contacted me saying they were starting a site called Alt-Jew and he wanted to know if I knew any right-wing Jews that would be interested. You never know about these things. It could have been a terrorist organization trying to get some names of people they could terrorize. Anyone can register a website. Well, not anyone, thanks to terrorist groups like the SPLC and ADL. Still, you never can be sure. The Reagan Battalion was an elaborate Soros fraud.

Regardless, it provides a reason to write about a subject that gets zero attention. That is the schism among American Jews, one that is looking a little bit like the divide within the white world. There are a growing number of right-wing Jews, who are wondering if liberal Jews are bad for Jews. It is not just politically, but culturally and racially. They look around at the demographics in America and see greater out-marriage, lower birth rates and the telltale signs of assimilation and secularization.

Anyone who has engaged with Orthodox Jews knows they regard Liberal Jews with a high degree of hostility. They are not as bad as the Hasidim, but they view Reformed Jews as fakers, getting the benefits of being Jewish without the commitment. Their relatively small numbers have made them easy to ignore, but demographics are changing quickly. Orthodox are 10% of American Jews and a full decade younger than the median age of Reformed Jews. They also have many more children per female.

Now, the Orthodox are famously ethnocentric. They also vote for conservative white candidates in elections. When it comes to identity politics, the Orthodox favor it over consensus. They may not be talking about ethno-states and separatism, but their revealed preferences run strongly in that direction. Like the Amish though, their numbers will only grow the old fashioned way. They do not recruit so they do not attract a lot of converts. Talk to anyone who has converted and they will tell you it is a long and challenging process.

There is another division, somewhat related to the Orthodox movement, and that is the Chabad movement. Here’s a Globe story from two years ago and a Forward story from last year for some background. One of the unique things about Chabad is they recruit and do so aggressively. They even recruit gentiles. I have had them put the arm on me more than once, even though they know I am not a Jew. President Trump’s son-in-law and daughter are Chabad. Joel Pollak, the Breitbart big shot, is Chabad. This is not an accident.

As that Globe story makes clear, the Chabad movement is a curious thing. On the one hand, they are Orthodox, which puts them culturally to the right of most people and way to the Right of most Jews. On the other hand, they seem to be following the model of the early Christian church by letting converts ease into the life. Jared Kushner is not growing a beard and wearing all black anytime soon. It is hard not to think that they are first concerned with growing the movement. They will worry about discipline later.

There is another piece to the puzzle. There are Conservative Jews who make up about 20% of American Jewry. These are the folks you will not only see filtering into the Chabad movement, but also on the fringes of the alt-right. They may or may not consider themselves white, but either way, they are fine with white identity politics. They think multiculturalism is madness. It is not just madness for Jews, but for everyone. Diversity is a cancer to be avoided. These are folks who would be called Alt-Jew.

The number of Conservative Jews sympathetic to the alt-right is debatable, depending upon how you define the terms. There are quite a few Jews supporting Jared Taylor’s work at American Renaissance. I correspond with maybe half a dozen Conservative Jews who share my politics. They think their numbers are growing as Jews in America come to terms with the failings of liberalism and reformed Judaism. To use a phrase, I picked up at AmRen, these are Jews who are religious, if not spiritual.

None of this means that Jews are suddenly going to lift Richard Spencer up and carry him to the throne of the ethno-state. It just means that demographics and shifting politics spare no one. Liberal Jews are old and not particularly fertile. Orthodox Jews are young and extremely fertile. Conservative Jews fall somewhere in between, but probably represent a much more practical alternative for American Jews who wish to remain American and Jewish. In a majority-minority world, everyone is going to have to pick sides.

For a distinct minority, it will also mean a return to strict ethnic solidarity. That means policing stuff like this that only serves to encourage the worst response from other groups in the population. Whether or not that happens or how it plays out is a mystery, but what is certain is that in the future, everyone will be voting their skin. That is how multiculturalism works. There is no place for modern liberalism, much less liberal Judaism, in a world of identity politics. Alt-Jew may be the only way forward.

Combat Sports

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Like a lot of people, I watched the big fight between Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor on Saturday night. They say six gazillion people watched it. As is always the case these days, the numbers are all lies and the real numbers are vastly lower than claimed. The live gate was about what you see from a typical fight, but the PPV was probably much higher than typical. UFC fans are conditioned to view their sport through television and on-line, rather than live.

Despite the fakery, it was a big deal and even casual fans found a way to watch it. The dirty little secret of modern life is that watching these things via a pirate stream is getting easier and more difficult to police. As we saw with the music business, the video rackets are nearing that point where the cost of policing the underground feeds will exceed the value of their product. There are simply too many ways to get around the paywalls and blocking mechanisms. This fight was probably the last big pay-per-view fight will see.

That is always the problem with artificial scarcity. It works for a while as the laws of supply and demand are universal. Make something scarce, relative to demand, and the prices rise. There is another universal law of economics though. Anything that has value will be stolen or faked. That means attempts to create artificial scarcity will be met with equal efforts to get around those barriers. That is what happened to the music business and now music is just about free. That is what is happening with pay television.

Still, the fight proved something that our betters have been telling us was no longer true and than is men still like being men. Fights are never and can never be pink hat affairs, where the girls show up and pretend to be fans. Boxing and MMA are male sports aimed explicitly at men. This fight was a contest between a bigger, younger man versus the older, but vastly more skilled smaller man. Men enjoy seeing that sort of thing. We like competition, but we like comparisons and contrasts in our competition.

During the broadcast, it became clear that the on-air people were instructed to use the phrase “combat sport” rather than the more common phrases. My hunch is the promoters saw the numbers for this thing and see a chance to bring fighting back as a popular sport again. Boxing killed itself with corruption and the UFC has a bum problem, but there is a market for good fights and the UFC is great at selling their product to young males. The contrast is styles between McGregor and Mayweather made it a great show.

If they fused the two sports, dropping the wrestling and tackling stuff entirely, there is a good chance they can create fun shows like this on a regular basis. Imagine if McGregor was allowed to kick and rabbit punch. It probably would not have changed the outcome, but it would have made it a bit fairer. Change the ring to make the ropes sturdier, like the cage in UFC, and the boxer has to change his strategy. There is a middle ground where you can create fun and interesting contests that men will pay to see.

The other thing the UFC can teach boxing is how to develop its talent. Boxing was destroyed by the crack epidemic. The urban gyms that worked as feeder systems for boxing were wiped out by the crack wars. The young guys looking for a way out of the ghetto were drawn into the big money of the drug game. Those still looking to go straight were too afraid to go into the rough areas where boxing gyms tend to be located. As a result, the flow of young talent in the US evaporated and so did the fan base.

That is the thing about MMA, which boxing can adopt. Go around the country and the mixed martial arts gyms are now where the old martial arts places were located. That is in suburban shopping centers. Middle-class white women are fine letting their boys go to these places as it feels safe and their snowflake is not getting bullied by urban blacks or robbed in the parking lot. Boxing can be sold to the white middle-class again, but in has to be sold on their turf. White people with kids no longer live in cities.

That is not to say boxing can ever make a comeback, at least to the status it once enjoyed. That world is gone. We live in the age of niche sports. Even mighty football (American) is feeling the pinch. There will always be a market for men fighting one another under agreed upon rules. Boxing and MMA are just that. If the end result is some fusion of the two that is both white-ish and suburban, that is not a terrible result. Healthy cultures have ways for men to compete, as well as watch and encourage other men to compete.

As to the fight itself, it was a fun show. As I pointed out prior to the fight, boxers are vastly better conditioned than MMA guys. McGregor was sucking wind in the third round and by the sixth he was clearly gassed. Mayweather is a great boxer and he knew exactly how to take apart McGregor. That said, the Irishman had a great plan and executed it well. He showed tremendous heart. He was just beaten by the better boxer, like everyone else Mayweather has faced. Both acquitted themselves well. It was a great show.

Killing Chickens

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Ralph Waldo Emerson said “When you strike at a king, you must kill him.” We are all familiar with it and its meaning. When you challenge authority, you better win, as authority cannot tolerate challenges. It’s why the people in charge are so ruthless in dealing with challenges to their power. They instinctively know that to do otherwise means being displaced. In all probability, they got to where they are by subverting or knocking off their predecessor.

That’s what we see going on with the Trump administration. The rules of the game, as designed by the political class, were supposed to prevent a guy like Trump from winning the Presidency. Instead, both parties would hire approved actors to put on a show, pretending to be bitter rivals. The voters would re-enact these mock battles among themselves, getting into arguments on-line and with friends. Then one candidate would “win”, pick a staff from the political class, and the party would keep going.

Trump was supposed to have his vanity run, then bow out in the primary, before he became too much of a distraction. The political class was so sure this would be the case, they never bothered to address Trump until it was too late. They thought they had it gamed out in the general election, but then those idiot voters did the wrong thing and voted for the wrong candidate. This challenge cannot stand, which is why they have been going berserk. The threat must be addressed, by any means necessary.

There’s another expression that is useful now. It is an old Chinese idiom. “Kill the chicken to scare the monkey”, which refers to making an example out of someone in order to threaten others. This was a popular aphorism during the Cultural Revolution where Chinese officials would routinely make an example of a deviationist to remind anyone else with heretical ideas that there are consequences to challenging authority. The college professor paraded around school and forced to confess to made up crimes let the other professors know who was really in charge of the school.

That’s what we are seeing with the coordinated assault on various dissident websites, like the Daily Stormer and now Stormfront. Neither of these sites are a great threat to the established order. The Stormer is a satirical site, the suppression of which proves just about every point the proprietor ever made about the ruling class. Stormfront is an old White Nationalist site that was content to mind its own business. But they both contain the word “storm” which is now a trigger word for the ruling class, so they were targeted.

What the registrars have done in both cases is steal the domain from the rightful owners, thus shuttering their sites. It’s brazen and illegal, but that’s the point. The message being sent is that the people in charge are not constrained by the law. They can do as they please. If you are a trouble maker out there, who has invested time and money in his site, you might want to watch what you say. Otherwise, a big tech company will steal your property and shut you down. That’s the message being sent with these acts.

It’s why they are picking on these two sites. Small guys operating on the fringe are easy for everyone else to dismiss. This encourages others to think, “well, they were asking for it. As long as I don’t do what they did, I should be OK.”  If they went after a bigger name or a site with deeper pockets, they create a sympathetic martyr and find themselves in court defending the indefensible. The one thing the people in charge have, or at least they think they have, is moral authority. Stormer and Stormfront are safe chickens to kill.

There is a corollary, of sorts, to that Chinese idiom. If they set out to scare the monkey, they better scare the monkey. Otherwise, they risk pissing off the monkey and the rest of the monkeys. That’s the delicate balance authorities must strike in times of crisis. There is a risk of squandering their moral authority and legitimacy. Make an example of the wrong guy and they risk a rebellion. It’s not always easy to know, as the reason a crisis exists is the rulers have lost touch with those over whom they are rule.

After the election, I made the point that Trump was a warning shot to the ruling class. They had to reform and Trump was that opening for them. If not, the next guy was not going to be as easy to deal with as Trump. That’s the lesson of history. The people challenging the old order start out hoping to work with the old order. They become radicalized or replaced by radical elements, only when the old order refuses to cooperate. The whole point of popular government is to accommodate this reality about human society.

The people who rule over us are sending a message of their own and have decided to make a few examples, to kill some chickens. The question they don’t know, what no one knows, is if it will scare the monkeys. The evidence so far is that all the ruling class has done so far is piss away their moral authority. “Attacking Nazis” rings hollow when you’re simultaneously trying to erase the Founding Fathers from the public square. It just makes the “Nazis” a useful tool for those wishing to gain the moral high ground defending speech.

For now, we just have a few dead chickens and a troop of increasing angry monkeys.

The Great Fear Podcast

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This week is mostly about our rulers and their efforts to suppress dissent. We now live in a country with dissidents and political prisoners. I also have something on Jason Kessler, the man responsible for the Charlottesville debacle. Since this is the weekend of the big fight, I weigh in with some expert commentary and a prediction. The last segment is the on the title of this episode, The Great Fear.

This week, Spreaker has the full show. YouTube has the full show and segments from the show. I am now on iTunes, which means the Apple Nazis can listen to me on their Hitler phones.

I have been threatening to stream this to GabTV and I still have not done it. Maybe this weekend, but whom am I kidding? I will be looking at some alternatives as well, as platforms that support free speech are not easy to find.

This Week’s Show

Direct Download

The iTunes Page

The War On Reality

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Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

–Philip K. Dick

That is a popular saying on the Dissident Right, because it stands in stark contrast to the dominant ideology of our age. The people who rule over us think reality will yield to wishful thinking. In fact, they deny reality exists as an objective, measurable thing. That’s where the idea of social construct arises. Our betters are sure that what we foolishly perceive as reality is just an illusion, an artifact of cultural conditioning. If they can convince enough people of this, then observable reality changes.

This is the true divide in the West and why civic nationalists are in the same ideological set as Progressives. They accept these assumptions about reality, just with some reservations. The Dissident Right, in contrast, rejects this entirely. Reality, particularly biological reality, is transcendent and independent of human observation. The world as we observe it is quantifiable and measurable. More important, it is largely immune to any tinkering we can do in the short run.

This is most true when it comes to human biology. John Derbyshire did a whole presentation on this at AmRen from the perspective of race. Race realism is just a subset of biological realism. The natural differences between the sexes, IQ differences and personality differences are other aspects. It is why “improving your mindset” sounds laughably ridiculous to someone like me. Your “mindset” is a product of your biology, your genetic makeup. You can no more change it than make yourself taller.

The fact that reality is undefeated, besting all comers, does not stop the cult that rules over of us from continuing to make war on biology. This story is the latest example of how they will destroy the military trying to prove that sex is a social construct.

A number of U.S. Army drill sergeants at Fort Benning, Georgia, have been temporarily suspended from their duties following allegations of sexual misconduct with trainees, the Army base said on Wednesday.

Investigators looking into an initial sexual assault allegation by a female trainee against a drill sergeant at the fort uncovered other incidents of alleged sexual misconduct, prompting a wider investigation, the base said in a statement.

A spokesman declined to say how many drill sergeants had been suspended as part of the investigation, but the statement indicated it was more than one.

Cracking down on sexual assault has been a priority for several years in the U.S. military, which reported in May that anonymous surveys in 2016 found that 14,900 service members experience some kind of kind of sexual assault in 2016, from groping to rape. That was down from 20,300 in 2014, according to the surveys, which are conducted every two years.

People who accept biological reality know it is a lethally stupid idea to have male drill instructors working with female trainees. Men like women, especially young women and they are wired to use every trick in the book to gain access to females. Setting up a situation where males have power over young females in this way, invites the sort of thing the military says they are trying to stop. Having girls in the army is debatable, but if you are, they need to be protected from the males.

Of course, females are wired to seek the attention of high status males. In boot camp, there is no one with higher status to the recruits than the drill instructor. That’s the whole point of the arrangement. The idea is to break down the recruits and build them back up into soldiers. Putting a male in charge of females is going to have the females competing with one another for the attention of their instructor. This is ground floor biology. Even the most disciplined males will be tempted at some point to say yes to the offer.

Again, this is not a new thing. The people putting males in charge of female recruits are the same people putting girls on Navy ships and then acting surprised when the girls get knocked up at sea. Currently, 16% of deployed females aboard ship are pregnant. You cannot serve on a Navy vessel while pregnant so it means these females are reassigned to shore duty. Overall, females in the Navy are 50% more likely to be reassigned to land duty than males, so it is not just pregnancy. It is biological reality.

This means that just about every ship in the fleet has a readiness problem, due to the lack of trained personnel. The Navy has a rule requiring every ship to be at least 25% female, so that means vessels cannot be deployed, because of the shortage of female sailors who are not pregnant. This 25% rule was just implemented. That’s why the pregnancy rates have gone up. It also means the rising pregnancy problem did not result in a reevaluation of the policy. Instead it was met with a new effort to prove that biology is not real.

The thing with the new religion is that it is always at odds with its stated goals. The simple solution to the pregnancy problem is to require all females to be on Norplant. This solves the pregnancy problem. Not only is this never suggested, doing so would set off howls from the cult about sexism. The reason is that such a requirement would require accepting biological reality. Instead of solving the problem or at least mitigating it, the cult prefers to wage a losing battle against biology, destroying the military in the process.

There is a reason reality is undefeated.

Affirmative Action And The Managerial State

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Misunderstandings and neglect create more confusion in this world than trickery and malice. At any rate, the last two are certainly much less frequent.

–Goethe

It is our nature, whenever we are examining the failings of our enemies, to assume the absolute worst motives and purposes. We want our enemies to be evil, so all of their mistakes and failures are proof of their villainy. This is particularly true in politics, where there is no benefit to acting honorably. In fact, the normal virtues are vices when it comes to jockeying for power in an organization. The truth is, though, our enemies are rarely evil and their mistakes are usually due to stupidity.

That is worth thinking about as we rocket into the custodial state, ruled over by layers of management. The people in charge are rarely in their positions due to merit. They are there because of serendipity, rumbswabbery or maybe they ticked the right boxes to satisfy the diversity engineers. Spend anytime around the Imperial Capital and you figure out that management teams are usually built for the team photo. The corporate partners of the state are suffering the same problem.

That is a good thing to keep in mind when following the Pakistani IT scandal. The latest is about the chief of staff to Yvette Clarke, a Congressman from New York. According to this story in the Daily Caller, her chief of staff casually signed off on what appears to be a theft ring operating inside the Democrat Congressional Caucus. The facts thus far suggest the Awan gang was running the oldest of scams. They would sell computer gear out the back door and claim it was stolen. F

Mx. Clarke is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, so it is reasonable to assume that her staff is not working math problems in their free time. Outwitting them is a challenge to no one. These are people that, in a better age, would be pulling a cart on a farm somewhere or unloading ships at the docks. They also believe that by ticking the right boxes, they are exempt from the rules that apply to the blue-eyed devil. That means they do not spend much time learning about those rules or complying with them.

That is the feature of this story thus far. Everyone on all sides of this thing can tick one of the correct boxes. There are no white men implicated in this scandal. Based on the news accounts alone, it is hard to imagine the Awan brothers getting extremely far with this fraud in the private sector. They were not particularly good at their work and they made salary demands no one would meet. Even small companies do rudimentary background checks on new employees and contractors. The Democrats never bothered to do any of it.

Now, there could be a nefarious motive behind all of this. The Paki IT people reportedly gained access to all of the Democrat’s data, including e-mail. That means they had lots of embarrassing material on their bosses. It also means their bosses were scurrying around looking for a way to cover their asses for having let these guys gain access to their systems and data. It is not unrealistic to think that blackmail and extortion were at the heart of this thing. No one wants to private correspondence made public, especially Democrats.

The willingness to sign off on theft of this magnitude is also a red flag. It is hard to say you did not notice what was happening when your name is on it and the theft amounts to ten percent of the budget. Throw in the extraordinary efforts made at the highest levels to protect the Awan gang from investigators and a skeptical man will start to think there is more here. It has all the contours of an extortion racket. At the minimum, the Democrats may have been trying to hide gross negligence and the mishandling of information.

Still, the way to bet here is that the people involved were morons. Even the Awan gang operated like a comedy act from old movies. Their car dealership scam was so clownish and amateurish it is a miracle they did not get bagged for that. The thumbless way they ran their scams makes it hard to believe they were expertly shaking down professional shake down artists like Wasserman-Schultz and Yvette Clarke. Politicians are rarely smart, but they are ruthlessly shrewd and they know how to work a con.

When you put this story into the mosaic of recent news stories, the pattern that emerges is one where stupidity is the primary feature of our betters. The foolish way Google handled their trouble should make everyone think twice about letting them manufacture driverless cars or protect your personal data. The reckless actions of PayPal, slamming shut accounts of dissidents, without any thought of the consequences, suggests the people making these decisions are dangerously stupid.

Of course, the recent shipwrecks by the Navy have a similar feature. These were easy to avoid errors, engineered by people who checked the right boxes. Maybe that’s unfair, but patterns are often unfair on the individual basis. The facts of life are unfair. A military that is hell bent on having trannies on submarines and refuses to acknowledge the pregnancy problem aboard ship, is not going to worry about social promotion and the consequences that arise from it. After all, diversity is not just their strength, it’s their reason to exist.

Everyone knows that even a committee of really smart people is never the sum of its parts. People in STEM fields will make this point about work teams. Start adding in stupid people with conflicting agendas and the team’s effectiveness will rapidly degrade. The smart people are suddenly burdened with the additional task of mitigating the damage done by the stupid members. Start scaling this up to custodial state size organizations and the same Smart Fraction issues faced by Detroit come into play with managerialism.

In the early stages of the custodial state, we may be seeing a fatal flaw. That is the pseudo-meritocracy, a mix of affirmative action and credentialism, may have internal contradictions that make the system unworkable. If you want to have a massive custodial state, you better select for the best and brightest, regardless of diversity. Alternatively, you can have diversity, but you better not give them too much power or empower too many of them.

In other words, you can diversity or managerialism, but not both.

The Forever War

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An empire is a lot like a super tanker. It moves slowly, but it is so huge it is nearly impossible to stop or steer. The best a capable leader can do is nudge it slightly off its current path, a slight course correction. Otherwise, the sheer momentum of the thing makes piloting it impossible. Generations of bad ideas have been loaded into the super tanker that is the American Empire. The momentum can only be arrested with a giant rip in the hull from an unseen object.

That’s what we’re seeing with Trump. He was full of big talk about ratcheting back US commitments around the world, particularly in pointless sinkholes like Afghanistan, where we have been killing people for going on a generation. To be precise and date our involvement to when we first put advisers on the ground, we have been in Afghanistan for 37 years now. Operation Cyclone was started under Carter and became the program the Reagan administration used to unseat the Soviet Union.

Now Trump is promising to make sure we are there for a 40th anniversary.

President Trump unveiled his plan for Afghanistan after seven months of deliberation Monday evening, announcing tweaks around the edges of the current strategy instead of a different approach.
He announced five “core pillars” to the approach: getting rid of any timelines for how long U.S. troops would remain in Afghanistan; using all elements of power, including diplomatic and economic; getting tougher on Pakistan; getting India to help more with economic development; and expanding authorities for U.S. forces to fight terrorists.

What the president did not announce was how many more U.S. troops would head to Afghanistan, which he decided earlier this year to leave up to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to determine.

He did, however, say the U.S. would no longer talk about troop levels or drawdown dates, making it unclear whether troop increases would be announced. There are currently about 8,400 U.S. forces in Afghanistan, and the president has reportedly approved of a plan to send about 4,000 more.

The pointlessness of this endeavor is finally admitted. Trump layered on a thick coating of his usual nonsense, but the truth is, no one knows why we are there anymore or what we are trying to accomplish. We are just going to remain there doing stuff because the generals now running American foreign policy like playing warlord. They got Trump to sign off on looser rules of engagement, so they can have some more fun shooting the locals, but otherwise it is more of the same.

That’s the thing we’re seeing that no one seems to be discussing. The civilian arm of the government is no longer in control of American military policy. In the Bush years, it was obvious that Cheney ran the show, with a bunch of generals and former generals, but at least Cheney was a civilian. Obama was just a figurehead in all aspects, but there were still a few civilians in the military policy loop. Trump has turned it all over to dazzling mediocrities like Mattis and Kelly.

The other aspect of this is the decision to hide from the public the details of what is going in Afghanistan. No more troop levels, no more timelines and no more answering questions about what we are doing there. In the managerial state, you are no longer a citizen with the right to ask questions of your government and they are no longer obligated to explain things to you. You are empowered and encouraged to fulfill your potential in an inclusive, welcoming environment!

Even the military has not escaped the corrosive effects of managerialism. This war is a managerial state war, where no one ever asks hard questions of their managers or even thinks much about it.  Decisions are made, meetings are held, action plans are drawn up and someone does a presentation to a committee. People get to put their participation on their resume. They get to put down that they were on a committee that conjured a program with a ridiculous name like “Operation Enduring Freedom.”

Some people console themselves with the belief that eventually the empire will be bled dry and our rulers will have no choice but to pull back. The trouble with that is our rulers can go on pillaging the middle class to finance this stuff for a long time. There’s nothing the people can do about it, short of open revolt. No matter which party they put in charge, the polices remain the same. Trump was supposed to be the warning shot, but instead he is turning into another kibble thrown into the maw of the managerial state.

America is now committed to being in Afghanistan for a few more years, bringing our engagement to at least four decades. The Brits hung around the place for roughly 90 years. The First Afghan War started in 1839 and the last British expats were evacuated in 1929 after a tribal uprising. Afghanistan had become independent in 1919, but the Brits hung around to “help.” Given that American rulers are much dumber than the old British colonials, it is safe to say that this is America’s forever war.

Pseudomorphosis

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The standard narrative to explain post-WW2 America is that the nation enjoyed the fruits of victory in the 1950’s, but then lurched into social upheaval in the sixty’s, starting with the election of John Kennedy. As a result, the Boomers get all the blame for the social dysfunction that has been with us for more than 50 years. That is not entirely fair as much of what happened was done by their parents. The disaster of the Civil Rights Movement started in the fifty’s. The Great Society was the early and mid-60’s.

Now, to the people who lived through the fifty’s and sixty’s, it probably felt as if the youth simply went insane and tried to drag the nation with them. Just as we are seeing today, it was the ruling elite that went bonkers, abdicating their duties and letting their rotten kids go berserk in the streets. That is the important part of it though. The late 60’s and early 70’s were a multi-generational war on decency. The youth rampaging through the streets, terrifying the white middle-class, did so at the behest of their parents.

In this regard, the social upheaval we think of as “The 60’s” was a continuation of a moral evolution in the Yankee elite, which started in the prior century. In the 19th century, Yankee reformers had Christianity as a limiting principle. This was largely true into the early 20th century, but then following the Great War, the Yankee elite lost its Christianity. Politics became a religion for Yankee reformers and the nihilism of the 1960’s was the logical conclusion of it. The Boomers have always been a dead end, as a result.

That is the thing that is increasingly clear as we see the death spasms of Progressivism in our age. There is no building on Boomer culture. The 60’s are sold as the great achievement of the Baby Boom generation, but in reality, it was a memorial to the Yankee ruling class. It is why there has been no second act to the 60’s. What we see today looks like a cargo cult, played out by a handful a mentally unstable youth, rounded up from local skateboard parks and heroin dens. It is why the Millennials are just useless whiners.

It is also why Generation Z is developing into something strangely different than anyone has expected. As someone pointed out the other day, this cohort is starting out far to the right of the rest of us. It is not the vapid “muh constitution” style conservatism either. It is a radical conservatism that has not been seen in a long time. They wildly supported the two most anti-establishment candidates on offer in 2016. It is not just a revolt against their parents rules either. It is a reaction to their pseudomorphosis.

The concept of pseudomorphosis is one that Oswald Spengler developed as a way of explaining partially manifested cultures. Specifically, pseudomorphosis entails an older culture so deeply ingrained in a land that a young culture cannot find its own form and full expression of itself. This leads to the young energy and promise being channeled into the old dead cultural forms. Like the animated corpses of a zombie movie, this youth culture hates the body into which it has been forced and rages against it and what made it.

That is what happened to the Baby Boom generation. They burst into the world full of energy, only to find themselves into a fully developed and completed American civilization. The old culture that built it was dying off, but it had been so successful that the civilization it had built was immune to modification by the post-war generations. As a result, all that youthful energy went into the exercise of the power in the existing institutions, but in a self-destructive rage against everything that defined and created those institutions.

What appears to be happening with Generation Z is something quite different from the superficial posing of youth in opposition to their parents. This generation rejects the very core of what they inherited. It is why, like the punks of the late-70’s, they adopt what the existing civilization considers to be their antithesis. It is also why they reject liberal politics and the institutions that spring from it. To the young generation, egalitarianism and the universal franchise are the problem, not a means to addressing the problem.

As is always the case with the young, there is not a well developed culture at this stage, just the void that existing culture should have filled. Since the old Yankee culture has died, something new is evolving with the next generations. Out of necessity and convenience, it will borrow the language and structures of the old culture, but only as raw material for the new. The reason sites like Daily Stormer or The Right Stuff have huge audiences of young white males has little to do with ideology. It is the lack of ideology.

That is what is not so obvious about the so-called neo-Nazi and white supremacist stuff that is associated with the alt-right. These symbols and language clear the field of the old ideology and the old culture that created it. It creates a clearing into which the next generations can build their own culture and their own ideology. That may be why the dying Left has reacted so violently to these relatively tiny groups. They could have ignored the Unite the Right rally entirely and 99% of Americans would never have known about it.

No one likes to be replaced. This is true at the individual level where you see senile old geezers hang around Washington until death. It is true of civilizations. The fire that animated them, the culture that built them, may have gone out long ago, but the people living in their accomplishments will fight to the bitter end. It is why all great empires end in rubble. The old American culture, the one born after the Civil War, reaching its zenith one hundred years later, will end in rubble too, a rubble of their making.