An Empire of Midgets

Posted on June 5, 2018 by thezman

Way back in the olden thymes, conservatives in Washington would argue with liberals about the realities of Federal spending and regulation. Liberals argued that if you spent more, people had more, while conservatives would point out that the money had to come from someone, as the government had no money, other than what it taxed. Similarly, when Washington put rules on business, conservatives argued, businesses would figure out ways around them, often making things worse than if there were no regulations.

While it was all for show, there was an important truth in the critique of liberals by conservatives. Not only are there trade-offs to all government policy, but every change also sets off a series of reactions to those changes. Pass a regulation and the mere act of passing it changes the conditions you are attempting to regulate. As businesspeople will tell you, even observing or measuring something can change people’s conduct. People act differently when they are watched. Liberals have never understood this basic truth.

The “war on hate” being waged by the Left is another one of those times where their extreme simple-mindedness is undermining the alleged point of their efforts. The lawsuit against Andrew Anglin by the terrorist groups SPLC has no basis in law, but it goes forward anyway. Similarly, the lawsuit by billionaire lesbian, Roberta Kaplan, against the Unite the Right people is another effort to pervert the law. These cases are nonsense, and the lawyers should be censured. They undermine the rule of law by making it arbitrary.

That is the theme of all of the Left’s recent efforts to shut down their critics. Take a look at the women claiming to have been “sexually assaulted” by famous men. In some cases, rare cases, the facts support the charge. In most cases, the facts suggest boorish behavior common to men since the dawn of time. In other words, the very meaning of the words used to govern male-female relations are losing their meaning. Instead of appeals to reason, these cases turn on appeals to mob rule played out in the media.

You see the same thing playing out in the workplace. That poor Starbucks employee who called the cops on two troublemakers lost his job and had to worry about his safety, for following the rules. These bakery employees are also fired because they did the prudent thing and refused to open up the shop after closing. Unbeknownst to them, there was an unwritten rule regarding blacks in the store’s policies. If they had opened the store and the black had robbed the place, they would have been fired for that too.

In the quest for social justice, the Left is obliterating all of the rules, even the rules that govern the language. Instead of having objective standards like an employee handbook or the courts, the rules are arbitrary and in a state of flux. In the short term, this works for them because the final arbiters are people from the cult. Corporate elites and the legal system are brimming with Progressive loons. The normal people who are the victims have yet to figure it out, so they keep acting as if the rules still apply as written.

This is, of course, an inevitable result of proportionalism. This is where the costs of violating laws and principles are weighed against the perceived benefits from violating those laws and principles. For instance, legal discrimination is wrong as a principle, but quotas and set asides allegedly have benefits that are too valuable to pass up, so the elite demands active racism in hiring. It is the belief that the smart people in charge can extract all the benefits of taking shortcuts, without suffering any consequences for it.

This depends on everyone else not changing their behavior when the rules no longer have meaning. That is obviously not happening. The rise of white identity politics is the direct result of this growing awareness. Whites are slowly figuring out that the prohibitions against identity politics only apply to them, so they are joining the party. Steve Sailer’s famous war on noticing only works if people do not notice. Once they do, then it becomes completely counterproductive. Political correctness is now driving white identity politics.

What the Left is doing with their lurch into lawlessness is destroying the conditions that make it possible for them to dominate. The short-term benefit of having angry broads rampaging through the corporate suites has the long-term cost of undermining everyone’s respect for the rules. The same is true of lawfare projects. Their success undermines the public’s respect for the law. The Left has been able to dominate because they slyly played by one set of rules, while everyone was encouraged to play by a another set of rules.

It is funny in a way. The managerial class has embraced multiculturalism as a religion, while claiming to have advanced beyond the “rule by man” sorts of governance that have been the rule since forever. Yet, in order to make multiculturalism work, the managerial class has to transform itself into the bureaucratic elite of every empire that existed on earth. That is, in order to keep all the tribes, cults and clans from killing one another, the people in charge have to administer ad hoc rules and arbitrary justice to keep the peace.

The trouble with this is the empire had the authority of the emperor and usually an aristocratic class. Even today, it is hard not to be impressed by the image of a Roman Emperor or French monarch. When the guys making stuff up as they go along live in castles and have a retinue of cool looking knights, it is easy to go along with the arbitrariness. When the people in charge have the majesty of a postal clerk, even the lowest orders think they can do better. Ours is becoming an empire ruled by midgets.

A Honkey In Newark

Posted on June 4, 2018 by thezman

The first thing you notice about the ghetto is the sound. It is loud. The black ghettos of America are urban, so you have the traffic noises, but that’s overlayered with the ever-present sound of the music. The steady thumping of hip-hop, urban, and soul music coming from every car, apartment window and the retail store. Then, of course, you have the people. Black people are loud, preferring to yell across a street at a friend than walk across and have a normal conversation. They even talk loudly into their cell phones.

Walking down Broad Street in Newark, I was reminded of my first trip to Mexico. Walking the streets of Nogales, I was struck by the energy. People were scurrying in all directions and music blared from the store fronts in an effort to lure in the tourists. Newark does not have tourists, but it has that same sort of frenetic, pointless energy to it. The downtown is also festooned with garish retail signs advertising the sorts of things you normally associate with a ghetto. There is a lot of money to be made off of the poor in America.

On my walk around downtown, I saw almost all blacks, but there were a few Asians and Hispanics. According to government statistics, 50% of the city is black and 36% is Hispanic, but they must be quartered elsewhere. I was the only member of the master race on the street, but no one seemed to notice. I have strolled through plenty of towns being the only white guy, so I probably have figured out how to make it look natural. I got some food at Haggar’s Halal Kitchen, and no one seemed to think it odd that I was white.

The funny thing about retail commerce in the ghetto is that it is free of the inhibitions you see in the outer world, with regards to the habits of minorities. Walking around Newark, every other shop seemed to be a nail salon. Black women love having exotic nails, so it makes sense to have a lot of nail shops, with lots of over-the-top signage. They are usually next to a shop that braids hair. Black women love their weaves, as much as they love their nails. In the ghetto, no one pretends this is something other than true.

Underneath a giant sign of Ras J. Baraka, the Mayor of Newark, is a store calling itself the Source of Knowledge. It must have started as an Afrocentric bookshop, but figured out why there are no bookstores in the ghetto. They added on African hair braiding and picture framing. Still, the shop is full of books, all of which are the blackety-black stuff you would associate with black nationalism. The shop fits in well with the 1970’s vibe you get walking around Newark. I was disappointed to learn that Big Mustafa was no longer around.

Speaking of Ras Baraka, I knew nothing about him until I saw the sign and decided to look him up. City Hall is on Broad Street, so I went down to have a look. They had a big banner up for Ramadan and some smaller banners for an African music festival. The building itself is quite imposing. It is not far from the Old First Presbyterian Church, where some of the state founders are buried. When I look at these old buildings, created in a different age by different people, I feel a twinge of sadness. Newark is a foreign country now.

As far as Baraka, he was not in, but going by his CV, I suspect he was at a poetry slam or maybe as a local hip-hop studio. He is an example of just how terrible this age has been for the black population. His father, a talented tenth, did real things and tried to make his race proud. Ras is a ridiculous person who would rather spend his time organizing hip-hop concerts than doing something for his people. Today, the talented tenth bolt for the white suburbs or they find ways make money reinforcing their peoples’ worst habits.

Walking around the city, I could not help but notice some nice early 20th century architecture. Even with the grime of ghettoization, you can still feel the grandeur of these old buildings. In the first half of the last century, Newark was a booming industrial town with a flourishing downtown. This is something you see in Baltimore, as well. If you tour Detroit’s bombed out districts, you see the same thing. It is like there are ghosts rising from the rubble to remind those who look, that it was not always the way it is today.

The truth is it does not have to be this way. It would not take a whole lot of will to fix a place like Newark. It has a great location. Install a strong man with authority to clean up the bad elements and crime could be cut in half within a year or two. The morgues would be busy, but it would solve the problem. Then you could bring in urban pioneers to gentrify the downtown and make it attractive to business. But that would mean facing up to realities about the human condition that our rulers simply cannot face.

The Faith Of The Left

Posted on June 3, 2018 by thezman

The reason the Left has gone from triumph to triumph is that they are not motivated by reason, but rather by a quest for salvation. The social issues that they champion, regardless of any practical considerations, are always cast in moral terms. The issue itself is immaterial. It is being on the right side of the issue that matters. Politics is an endless series of tests they must pass in order to remain on the path of the righteous, leading to the promised land.

This story about Obama’s reaction to the election is a good example.

Riding in a motorcade in Lima, Peru, shortly after the 2016 election, President Barack Obama was struggling to understand Donald J. Trump’s victory.

“What if we were wrong?” he asked aides riding with him in the armored presidential limousine.

He had read a column asserting that liberals had forgotten how important identity was to people and had promoted an empty cosmopolitan globalism that made many feel left behind. “Maybe we pushed too far,” Mr. Obama said. “Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe.”

His aides reassured him that he still would have won had he been able to run for another term and that the next generation had more in common with him than with Mr. Trump. Mr. Obama, the first black man elected president, did not seem convinced. “Sometimes I wonder whether I was 10 or 20 years too early,” he said.

This is a recurring theme with the American Left. It is the reason they embraced the term “Progressive” as their preferred label. They start with the unspoken belief that the story of man is written. It is the duty of the righteous to live it. It is why “being on the right side of history” comes up so often. The struggle as between those on the side of the great historical force and those who are standing in the way of it. The righteous are always looking forward and moving forward.

It is also why they think of the past as a dark age dominated by sinners. There is no romanticism on the American Left, because the past is by definition further away from the glorious future. Instead, the past is filled with monsters that were either slain by the righteous, or locked away, but ready to return at any moment. For example, they remain forever vigilant about the return of Nazis, as if they still exist. In the mind of the American progressive “Nazi” is just another name for Old Scratch.

Notice in that Times piece that the Trump voters are described as “left behind” rather than unhappy or in disagreement. In other words, the people voting for Trump did so because they were sad for having been left behind by the righteous. Voting for Trump was a cry for help. It is tempting to see this as part of Obama’s narcissism, but in reality, his narcissism is also the result of this deep belief in the flow of history. He was chosen to lead the faithful, so of course he is a narcissist.

You will notice that Progressives are forever warning about some attempt to “turn back the clock” and return us to a former state of sin. It resonates with Progressives, because for them, the eternal quest for salvation means going forward, breaking away from the degraded past. Trump’s “turning the clock back” is viewed as the wages of sin. Obama thinks he tried too hard to deliver his people to the promised land. The result was the great leap backward into Trumpism.

American Progressives are the purest form of true believers because they have disconnected their beliefs from practical considerations. Therefore, they are immune to facts and reason. When you examine the language they use to describe politics and culture, you see the extreme mysticism. Obama does not even really know what “left behind” means, but he is sure it is a bad thing. For him, it is a purely a spiritual issue to be thought of in those terms.

The error the Right has made for generations is to think it is possible to prove the Left wrong, and therefore force them to abandon their agenda. That is like thinking you can disprove sections of the Koran and cause the Muslims to abandon their faith. In fact, efforts to do so will always be met with a fierce defense of the faith. Practical arguments always embolden the righteous, as it confirms their belief in themselves as moral agents in a holy cause. Your irrational resistance is proof they are on the righteous path.

It is why the Left have been so effective since the end of the Cold War, but also why it has become so extreme and bizarre. Defending socialism meant ceding authority to objective data like the unemployment rate or GDP growth. That served as a check on the more unhinged elements. Once free of these objective measures, it became a race to produce the most extreme and bizarre identity group to champion. Lacking a limiting principle, and untethered from practical reality, the Left got increasingly extreme.

While it looks like the Left is headed for some sort of crack up, it is important to remember that people have to believe in something. The reason conservatism was such a flop is it never tried to appeal to this aspect of man’s nature. It was the ideology of the bookkeeper. No matter how fat, dumb and happy, people will always yearn for the eternal. If there is to be an alternative to the prevailing orthodoxy, it is going to have to offer an alternative to those who desire to be on the side of angels.

Bum Fight

Posted on June 2, 2018 by thezman

Years ago, I was driving through a rural area in the early evening and as I came up on what looked like an old store, I saw a small crowd out front. The place was a broken down old gin mill and the people out front were watching two scraggly looking drunks duke it out. It was a sad sight. This was the sum total of two lives, drunk and punching one another in the face for the amusement of the crowd. That came to mind reading David French’s critique of this column by David Brooks.

French highlights this passage of the Brooks column:

Once upon a time, white male Protestants ruled the roost. You got into a fancy school if your father had gone to the fancy school. You got a job at a white-shoe law firm or climbed the corporate ladder if you golfed at the right club.

Then we smashed all that. We replaced a system based on birth with a fairer system based on talent. We opened up the universities and the workplace to Jews, women and minorities. University attendance surged, creating the most educated generation in history. We created a new boomer ethos, which was egalitarian (bluejeans everywhere!), socially conscious (recycling!) and deeply committed to ending bigotry.

You’d think all this would have made the U.S. the best governed nation in history. Instead, inequality rose. Faith in institutions plummeted. Social trust declined. The federal government became dysfunctional and society bitterly divided.

Now, putting aside the ret-conning, you would think French highlighted this section in order to make the obvious point. That maybe smashing the old system and turning the institutions over to “Jews, women and minorities” was the reason for the collapse in social trust, plummeting faith in institutions and a bitterly divided society. For that matter, you would think the guy who wrote that passage would have noticed the obvious link between overthrowing the old order and today’s chaos.

Instead, Brooks goes on to list nonsense reasons like “Inability to think institutionally” as the cause of the trouble. This is pretty much the opposite of reality. The managerial class is incapable of anything other than institutional thinking. The section labeled “Misplaced idolization of diversity” is nonsensical, but he is not allowed to say anything but nonsense when it comes to race, so Brooks wants the managerial elite to go on a team building excursion so they can feel better about themselves.

For his part, French is even more clueless.

Combine academic ignorance with a worldview that too often unthinkingly and reflexively rejects religious traditions and traditional religious notions of morality, and you’ve got the recipe for exactly the proud, “elite” individualist Brooks describes. Or, to borrow a biblical concept, “claiming to be wise, they became fools.”

He is right that the “meritocracy is here to stay,” but he’s wrong that we “need a new ethos to reconfigure it.” An old ethos will do, one grounded in humility, true curiosity, and an openness to challenging ideas.

It’s not that America’s “educated elite” has truly failed; it’s that America’s “educated elite” no longer really exists.

This is a guy who races to the front of the room whenever Conservative Inc. calls for a two minutes of hate against sexism, antisemitism, or racism. Conservatism is in free-fall because it has been defiantly close-minded to ideas that challenge the prevailing orthodoxy. The fact that the swelling ranks of the Dissident Right see guys like David French as part of the problem should be a clue, but that would require true curiosity about what’s going on and an openness to challenging ideas.

That said, he is not entirely wrong. The managerial state inevitably has to boil off the people who question the system. This is the iron rule of institutions. Some small portion care about the mission, but the bulk are simply their to defend the system and the perks which come from being a part of it. That’s what has happened in America. The ruling class is populated with the sorts of people gifted at repeating that they have been told, but incapable to questioning the status quo. Our elites are uniformly dull and unimaginative.

That’s why the West in general, but American in particularly is going through these populist convulsions. The people who run the institutions are incapable of questioning the logic of the institutions they serve. Both Brooks and French accept as an axiom that turning things over to “Jews, women and minorities” is a good in itself. Therefore they can’t question their role in the current troubles. They are emotionally wedded to the premise of the so-called meritocracy, so they inevitably must defend it from all challenges.

Fundamentally, no society can be run on merit. Any system that attempts to select for ability will inevitably select for that which reinforces itself. That’s what has happened in post-war America. The institution grew in size and reach, but their institution knowledge narrowed. The per capita Federal budget, for example, is three times larger today than 50 years ago, measured in constant dollars. Yet, the differences between the political parties has never been narrower. That’s why elections have had no impact on policy.

It’s also why people like French and Brooks worry about the “dysfunctional federal government and bitterly divided society.” The populist revolt is a direct challenge to the very idea of a managerial elite. Trump, for good or ill, is the rejection of that concept. He is not a man of merit. He is a man of accomplishments, which is a different thing than a list of credentials. David Brooks can sneer all he likes, but no one is putting his name on the side of a big building. No one is asking David French to build their luxury golf resort.

The Eurocast

Posted on June 1, 2018 by thezman

This week the podcast goes international, as we do a whole show on those strange foreign people called Europeans. I wanted to do something on Italy and while scanning the wires for updates on their situation, I found other stuff worth covering. Our mass media only reports on the world when it is on fire, so it is good to look around at foreign and alternative press to get a fuller understanding of the world. It also made for a good theme to the podcast this week. I always like it when there is a theme to the show.

One administrative note. Next week there will not be a podcast. I’m traveling all next week and possibly into the following week. I have done podcasts on the road, but it is a big hassle and I’m not going to fight it. Blogging from the road is no big deal, but recording requires a much higher level of effort. If you need your weekend fix, try out FTN, which is doing a new feature where they cover a single topic in detail. Last week they did a long analysis on China, which was very good. You can find their shows here.

This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. Spreaker has the full show. I am up on Google Play now, so the Android commies can take me along when out disrespecting the country. I am on iTunes, which means the Apple Nazis can listen to me on their Hitler phones. The anarchists can catch me on iHeart Radio. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below.

This Week’s Show

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