Monthly Archives: February 2019

The Case For Reparations Talk

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Presidential hopeful Kamala Harris has tried to stir things up by coming out with a plan for reparations. Her scheme is short on details, but it is basically an as yet undefined special tax break for qualified people. She’s not the only left-wing candidate supporting the idea, but she is the first to talk about it in any specifics. It is an idea the radicals all think is a winning idea. For now, most are content to offer lip service, while making references to Ta-Nahisi Coates and his 2014 essay The Case For Reparations.

There’s an assumption among white radicals that all blacks have committed that essay to memory. In reality, 90% of blacks have never heard of Coates or his essay. That’s because Coates is the sort of boutique black that is only popular with the sorts of bourgeois radicals you see on the college campus or the Acela. He is the sort of black that only Progressives can love, in that he confirms all of their deepest held beliefs about their righteousness and never dares ask the wrong questions.

The amusing thing about their love for Coates is that he tends to make the case you often hear on this side of the great divide. His essay is so poorly written and constructed, it’s nearly impossible to critique, as that would require taking it seriously. It veers between conspiracy theory and emotive gibberish. There’s a paranormal quality to much of it, as he works from the assumption that racism is this spirit force that manipulates whites into doing bad things to blacks, without them ever noticing it.

Of course, the usual suspects are in a panic over this sudden burst of honesty from the radicals leading the anti-white coalition. They will never say it, but they know Hillary lost because she was unable to fool enough white voters. If whites wake up from their hallucinations and suddenly see things as they are, the coalition of the ascendant is in a lot of trouble. Telling Baby Boomers that they plan to take their loot and give it to blacks is the fastest way to get them off the golf course and into activism.

That is, of course, part of the plan. The Democrats always run far Left in their primary and then come back to less insane positions in the general. They can rely on the media to memory hole their nuttier comments and positions. They can also count on Republicans to never bring this stuff up. More important, they will never have to explain their plan or defend it against a thoughtful response. Instead, they will rely on the usual suspects in Conservative Inc. to play their role as the racist bigot opposed to reparations.

That’s an important thing to get here. The Left is all about morality. Whatever details they offer are just the minimum to complete the stage set. What they are doing here is carving out two roles, one for themselves and one for the Boomer right-winger, who seems to only care about his money, rather than justice. The role for Lefty in this play is to be seen as heroically defending the helpless non-whites, who are endlessly under assault from the institutional white privilege. The right-wing Boomer always falls for this gag.

There is a better response, one that the media and palace guards from Conservative Inc. will fight to make sure never happens. That answer is to agree, in principle, with the concept of reparations for the descendants of slaves. The one condition is that it has to be a good faith effort to arrive at a number that pays the debt in full. Since we’re mostly talking about cash payments, whatever that number is and whatever the degree of vengeance required, the final number has to stamp the debt “paid in full.”

That is, after all, the point of reparations. The person claiming to have been harmed, seeks to be made whole, by the person causing the harm. After a war, the winner will impose reparations on the loser, in order to facilitate peace. The cost of winning and imposing peace is imposed on the loser as both punishment and restitution. Once the debt is paid, that’s the end of it. If payments are supposed to continue into forever, without end, then that’s not reparations. That’s tribute and that’s what needs to be established.

That’s why a thoughtful person should always respond to this issue with a willingness to discuss the issue. The first question to Harris should be, “Is this a good faith effort to reach a final settlement, where the debt to blacks is fully paid?” Most likely, she would not know how to answer the question. The reason for that is she does not understand the definition of the word reparations. It just resonates with her target audience. What she and they, however, have in mind is tribute, a browngeld to be paid forever.

This is why responding to this stuff on-line with nutty demands like “Well, I’ll give them reparations once they return to Africa” is as dumb as blacks thinking they will be getting an extra check on top of what they get now. It just reinforces the moral argument made by the radicals, while blinding the intended victims to what’s happening. White people need to understand that they will pay. That’s written in stone. The question is, what do we get for those payments? When is this debt finally stamped “paid in full?”

Inevitably, the radicals representing the coalition of the ascendant cannot put a number on it and they cannot agree that there is a number. That’s because they are talking about tribute, rather than reparations. The question that must always follow a demand for tribute is, “If we refuse, then what?” Tribute must always include the threat of force and that’s what has been true about the Left for a long time. It’s why they avoid facts and logic. They make the demands with the assumption everyone knows what “or else” means.

Another angle to this approach is it would inevitably reveal another truth to what’s happening in this age. The radicals would not be able to limit the scope to the descendants of former slaves. Look at the language all of them are using. They never specifically say descendants of slaves. Harris simply says “qualified people of all races.” The reason for this is they are not championing the cause of American blacks, they are leading a coalition of non-whites, many of whom just got here, against white people.

For example, most whites are unaware that South Asians are in on this. Spend time in the Imperial Capital and you’ll notice most of the IT work is done by Indians. Africans, as in people from Africa, can go through special doors to get into colleges and graduate schools, simply because they are black. Latinos have their free pass too. None of these people have plausible grievance against American whites, but they get the handout because they are not white. That’s a reality white people need to face.

Seriously discussing this helps break the conditioning that seems to keep the older generations in a daze, as if they are drugged. The ascendant will never embrace the culture of American whites. They seek to drain the resources and power from whites, so they can dictate terms. This is not a competition they seek to win and then be generous to the vanquished. There is no generosity in their heart. We know this because there is no gratitude there ether. For them, reparations are vengeance with a dollar sign.

The point of our project is to raise awareness and wake up as many whites as possible to the new reality of this age. This is an opportunity to do just that. To allow mindless civic nationalists to lapse into their programmed responses is a mistake. These normie whites need to be slapped across the face and one way to do that is to embrace the issue of reparations seriously and dispassionately. Ask the question, “What is the number that pays the debt in full?” The answer is another red pill.

We have A Word For That

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One thing you cannot help but notice, if you travel, is that English is just about everyone’s second language. In many parts of the world, their second language is almost as common as their first. In Iceland, for example, you hear as much English in the streets as Icelandic. The locals just seem to assume that people they don’t know are going to prefer English, while people they know will prefer Icelandic. In effect, they have a public language and private language. This is something you see in many places.

It used to be that French was the language of diplomacy. It is where we get the expression lingua franca. Of course, long before that, Latin was the official language of global affairs. In the case of French, it was simply a matter of France being the dominant power on the Continent, so French was the language of diplomacy among Europeans, but not the rest of the world. Latin was the language of the Church, so while the whole of Europe was Catholic, it was a useful common tongue for diplomacy.

The rise of English is a slightly different matter. For sure, the Pax Americana has a lot to do with English becoming the diplomatic language of the West, but it does not explain it becoming the public language. That’s probably due to the rise of global corporations in the last fifty years. Many European countries started teaching English in schools, because it would be useful in the work place. American companies would be more inclined to hire a German who spoke some English than an Italian with no English.

Power and money are always good answers to most questions, because they are easy to understand and confirm things we like to believe about the world. We want to think that there are great benefits to being rich or powerful, like imposing your language and religion on those over whom you rule. There’s certainly some truth to it, but it does not explain everything. For example, the prevalence of English in the Nordic countries is much higher than in France or Italy. The Germans have a lot of English speakers too.

Another possibility for why English has becomes the universal language is the rise of science and technology as cultural forces. English is extremely useful in science, because of its precision and flexibility. English is a not a language with a lot of words that have two very different meanings. For example, study and studio mean entirely different things. In French you would use the same word and the context would make the distinction. Few words in English need context to have a full meaning.

The other thing about English is it adopts new words, either from other languages or out of the blue, with great speed. This post by paleontologist John Hawks is an amusing example of how the flexibility of language works with science and technology. Most languages don’t adopt loan words very well. Instead, they have to take existing words and combine them together to get something like the meaning of the new word. German is hilarious with this. Lots of Zungenbrechers in German with new words.

It is possible that English is a better language for science and technology, where new abstract concepts are common. It is easier to invent a new word or borrow a word, like synergy for example, and imbue it with a definition that captures the new idea, rather than force the new idea into the old grammar. The word synergy was kicking around psychology for a century, before it was picked up by tech companies and turned into a catchy word to describe involuntary cooperation through the use of technology.

Of course, the implication here is that English evolved with people who were better at science and technology. It’s certainly true that the Industrial Revolution started in England and first spread to northern Europe. It’s certainly true that northern Europeans remain the most inventive people on earth. This is probably just a coincidence or perhaps something to do with ecology, as everyone knows there are no differences between people anywhere at any time under any conditions. To suggest otherwise is bad.

Even so, the rapid adoption of English as the official second language in European countries with a common heritage is suggestive. These countries have also always had a high and low version of their languages as well. High German is thought to derive from the Suebi people. Low German, the various German dialects in central Europe, come from the other tribes. Perhaps having a public language and private language, a public custom and private custom, is the real root of this phenomenon, rather than modern technology.

Regardless of the cause, English is becoming the official language of the planet, even as the ratio of Europeans to everyone else rapidly shrinks. Communicating in English is more efficient and more accurate across the wide swath of humanity. There are exceptions at the fringes, but there always are. In the main, English is becoming the public language of the world. That means the elite of the future will be plucked from those with the cognitive skills best suited for mastering the complexity of English thought.

That’s the part you can see in your daily life. There are South Asians, for example, who have a delicate mastery of English. There are others who are comical eruptions of misnomers and butchered grammar. No matter how hard they try, they just can’t think in English or even pretend to think in English. As a result, their mastery of the language is limited to mimicry. Since language is about communicating abstract concepts, these people will never be able to rise to the upper reaches of the cognitive class.

This is usually where the bad people bring up the phrase Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which then results in the usual suspects leaping from the bushes yelling “That had been debunked!” In truth, the strong version has simply been dismissed, because it does not fit in with the blank slate argument. Spend time around people, who speak English as a second language, You will notice that some are thinking in English, while others are just interpreting their native thoughts into English sounds.

It’s pleasant to think that the dominance of English portends good things for native English speakers and their cousins in Europe, but the Suebi may be the better example. They left a lot of their culture, but none of their people. There are claims by some to be the decedents of the Subei, but there is no proof as of yet. Most likely, the Subei were wiped out by strangers who flowed over the borders.

Public-Private Propaganda

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Propaganda works on the assumption that most people yield to the authority of the state and most people yield to the opinions of their fellow subjects. Propaganda does not have to convince everyone or even a majority of everyone. It just has to work on that third that are ready and willing to believe. That group will be enthusiastic enough to convince the third that tends to follow the strong horse, even when in doubt. The third prone to skepticism is then outnumbered and less inclined to speak up.

In the modern age, liberal democracies are not going to have ministries of truth or official propagandists. That was the flaw of various forms of communism. They eliminated the private sphere entirely, so even the official religion of communism could not circulate freely among the people. The commies could not rely on the “right” position to spring forth on its own and circulate among the people, because the mechanisms for birthing it and spreading it were destroyed, along with the rest of the private property.

Joseph de Maistre observed that “false opinions are like false money, struck first of all by guilty men and thereafter circulated by honest people who perpetuate the crime without knowing what they are doing.” The best propaganda is therefore struck by the believers in the private realm and circulated by honest people, who have their desire for truth perverted into a vehicle for spreading falsehoods. This story from last fall in the Daily Mail is a great example of how propaganda spreads in a liberal democracy.

The claim, for those uninterested in reading the story, is that women are becoming less faithful in their relationships. The story is based on a book by someone calling herself Wednesday Martin. Her claim, based on her qualitative research into the subject, is that modern women are more adulterous than in the past. For those unfamiliar with Xirl science, that’s a nice way of saying she sat around local coffee shops, talking to hens about their sex lives. There is no data in the book or the story.

Given the demographic of the people featured in the story, this book is a bodice ripper of sorts for the middle-aged white women. The standard model for the romance novel is the dashing stranger with money, they always have money and status, ravishing the heroine, in some exotic location or time period. The new model is to have “real life” women talk about their fantasies. In this case, it is middle-aged hens talking about their steamy affair with Roger from accounting, while her husband was on a business trip.

Of course, a good chunk of females want to believe this stuff. Those romance novels don’t fly off the shelves by accident. The soft-core porn book Fifty Shades of Grey sold 125 million copies and spawned a series of movies. It has been known since the ancients that women fall for the steamy romance, because women like to be flattered. The romance novel allows the reader to think she too could be caught up in a great adventure, the object of the desire, fought over by exciting high status males.

In our age, where the people in charge want women to work in the fields and refuse to have children with white men, promoting the idea of female adultery is useful. It’s not that they want women to be adulterous. It’s that they like the idea to gain currency, because it confirms the themes of feminism. It also anathematizes the sensibilities of normal women who are happy to be wives and mothers. The fact that it sells books and movies is a bonus, as it encourages even more of it from other corners.

Now, the fact is there is no data suggesting women are more adulterous today than at any time in history. In fact, the data we have reveals that women were less adulterous in the past than previously believed. Science can now use DNA to figure out if famous person X was in fact the child of his famous father. It’s one of the unexpected byproducts of ancient DNA studies. Similarly, what’s being revealed by the proliferation of ancestry services is that the number of birth outside of the marriage is quite low.

The natural counter to this observation is that modern birth control is probably obscuring this alleged growth in female infidelity. That argument is from another bit of propaganda used to peddle birth control. In the West, the promotion of birth control was based on the argument that ignorance results in unwanted pregnancy, so the solution is to put this into the children’s school curriculum. The claim is absurd. People have always known how babies are made and how to avoid making them. Look up Silphium, if you’re curious.

Regardless, this story about the alleged rise in female infidelity shows how the privatization of propaganda is vastly more effective than what you see from authoritarian regimes. The people in charge merely have to favor certain information over others and the media bullhorns magnify these preferences. For example, on Amazon you can buy The Unabomber’s Manifesto, but you cannot buy Greg Johnson’s The White Nationalist Manifesto. The people in charge are indifferent to the former, but not the latter.

The volunteer army of box wine aunties that stalks social media looking for blasphemers is another example. You’ll note that the overwhelming majority of left-wing agitators on-line are unattached females looking for attention. The propaganda machine has weaponized unattached females, turning them into enforcers of the orthodoxy. Once again, the heavy lifting is not done at the agency or propaganda. It is done in corporate boardrooms. The Soviets never had such an effective and dedicated army of spies.

This system that rewards the counterfeiters of truth and punishes the skeptics is not something created by design. It is a natural byproduct of liberal democracy. When the only authority is the general will, the fifty percent plus one, controlling public opinion became the point of everything. Once one ideological camp gains an edge, they leverage that by supporting their fellow ideologues and punishing their opponents. It’s why institutions move from a normal status into a deranged one, like we see with the Boy Scouts.

It’s also why the ratio of lies to truth in the public sphere seems to be increasing geometrically. The quantity of truth in the world is always fixed. The math of existence is the denominator of life. The numerator, however, is the falsehoods. Systems like communism and liberal democracy require greater amounts of propaganda in order to survive, so before long the numerator dwarfs the denominator. It’s why we live in a sea of fake news and nonsense studies about human behavior, written by morons.

The New Narrative

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Spend time in a small business that has stood the test of time and you will learn the origin myths of the company and the founders. These myths will have plenty of truth content, but a lot will be fanciful or exaggerated. One reason is the story is inevitably told by the founder or his heirs, so it is self-serving. Another reason is the story is intended to give meaning and purpose to the people in the company. For an origin myth to work, it has to be inspirational and reflect well on the people in the organization.

People always have origin myths, of course. The most famous of which is the story of the Jews. The whole chosen people business is obvious nonsense. The flight from Egypt is at least plausible in some areas, but unless you’re willing to accept that God is an indiscriminate child killer, it’s a story that only Jews can believe. Still, the origin myth of the Jews has served them well for a very long time. These stories are central to Jewish identity and it is that strong identity that has allowed Jews to prosper.

If a strong set of origin myths correlates to a strong sense of identity and a strong people, then the reverse is probably true. The lack of origin myths, or a declining interest in the origin myths, probably suggests a weak identity. Perhaps the people have yet to come to identify themselves as a people or they are going through some sort of transition in terms of how they see themselves. The old myths no longer work, because they don’t fit the emerging narrative to explain how it is this people came to be.

This longish post in Foreign Affairs by popular historian Jill Lepore is an interesting read for a number of reason, not related to this post. The endless name dropping that torments writing in the humanities is a topic of its own. That’s mingled with self-promotion, in the form of references to the author’s books. Of course, anything to do with American history has to have a few paragraphs of the usual blather about slavery and Jim Crow. That said, it is worth the time to read it and the related posts on the site.

Lepore is one of those useful bellwethers in that she tends to write what the intellectual side of the ruling class is thinking. A big part of being a popular academic is to be in good standing with the ruling elite. They like being told about their wonderfulness from academics, so flattery is a big part of the game. That offers a window into the minds of the people who rule over us. What posts like this suggest is the people in charge are concerned with the fracturing they see from their position in the clouds.

That fracturing is predictable. Peter Brimelow predicted it two decades ago. Import tens of millions of strangers with strange customs into America and you’re going to get conflicts between the locals and the newcomers. The fact that these strangers were imported to replace the natives, who were not consuming and reproducing at levels satisfactory to the rulers, certainly did not help. Add in the rise of identity politics as a way to control the population and the result was predictable. Pat Buchanan predicted this.

Lepore is correct that people need a narrative that binds them together and explains why it is they are a people. America had an obvious one until the Civil War. When New England conquered the rest of the nation, the national story ended and was replaced by that new story that put New England at the top, as the ruler of the rest. That held together into the middle of last century, when Jews updated the tale to insinuate themselves into the story and explain their new dominance in the ruling class.

That American narrative worked until the people in charge decided they needed a new people and flung open the gates to unlimited immigration. A fascinating bit in that Lepore article is that she starts her essay in 1986 with the historian Carl Degler and his warning about the abandonment of nationalism. That talk would have happened around the time the ruling class was opening the borders. The implication that Mx. Lepore does not seem to grasp is that the hostility to nationalism preceded wholesale immigration.

On the other hand, she is a clever woman, so she could very well have done this on purpose, as a way of injecting the idea into the bloodstream of her peers. The academy is so narrow now, it is looking like a singularity from our perspective, but inside there is some room to maneuver. It requires a heavy dose of esoteric language and triple bank shot references to avoid detection. Perhaps that’s what she is up to by starting with that Degler speech and then ending with a piquant quote from that same talk.

That said, if the intellectual class in the West, but particularly in America, had not drawn all of the wrong lessons from the two great industrial wars of the 20th century, the ruling class would not have set about destroying the fabric of their countries. Perhaps the Frankfurt School notions were a bad idea after all. There’s no mention of this in the Lepore essay, but that an obvious implication once you read to the end. The finishing paragraph is a quote from Degler’s talk at that 19856 conference.

“The history of the United States at the present time does not seek to answer any significant questions,” Degler told his audience some three decades ago. If American historians don’t start asking and answering those sorts of questions, other people will, he warned. They’ll echo Calhoun and Douglas and Father Coughlin. They’ll lament “American carnage.” They’ll call immigrants “animals” and other states “shithole countries.” They’ll adopt the slogan “America first.” They’ll say they can “make America great again.” They’ll call themselves “nationalists.” Their history will be a fiction. They will say that they alone love this country. They will be wrong.

Again, there is no mention of open borders and the unprecedented levels of immigration in this essay, as those things cannot be discussed openly or rationally in the intellectual class. Still, the essay suggests that there is some interest by cloud people in what is happening among the dirt people. They can’t bring themselves to address the fact that you cannot have a common story when everyone is a stranger. Instead, they keep talking about Hitler and the other wrong lessons they drew from the events of last century.

There’s also the strange sense that these origin myths can simply be conjured and then imposed upon a people. The implication of this essay is that America needs a new one, so the people in charge better get busy creating one. The trouble is that white people are not allowed to have an identity and the non-white ascendancy does not have much to point to, as far as their contributions to the national story. Lepore offers something from Frederick Douglas as a starting point for this new national narrative.

A Government founded upon justice, and recognizing the equal rights of all men; claiming no higher authority for existence, or sanction for its laws, than nature, reason, and the regularly ascertained will of the people; steadily refusing to put its sword and purse in the service of any religious creed or family, is a standing offense to most of the Governments of the world, and to some narrow and bigoted people among ourselves.

That is no doubt inspiring to the cloud people, but it says more about how they see themselves than with the facts on the ground. It’s also a negative identity, based on victories over demons that exist only in the imaginations of the rulers. It also suggests she or her masters would like to see whites written out of this new national story. In case it is not clear, “bigoted people among ourselves” is you paleface. Perhaps that can be a useful cri de guerre in the war with the dirt people, but it is not binding narrative.

The fact is, the rise of nationalism, populism and white identity politics is a result of decisions made long ago. The radicals killed the national narrative, because they said nationalism is a dangerous construct. Their solution was to destroy the nations of the West, which has meant destroying the national identities of the West. That has now devolved into a war on the native stock of the West. There can be no unifying narrative that includes the both the destroyers and their victims.

That brings us back to the start. That small business that gets gobbled up by a multinational cannot maintain its origin myths. The people in that firm can no longer identify with that story, because that story has come an end. If they stick around, it is because of new reasons, less inspiring ones than those that bound them to that small business. That’s what we are seeing today in modern America. The old narrative has come to an end. It is time for a new one. The question is, who will do the writing.

Smollett Thoughts

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Because I am not insane, I assumed the Jusse Smollett caper was a hoax as soon as it made the news. It ticked all the boxes of a hoax. The alleged victim was a black Jewish homosexual, who makes a living as a drama queen. The alleged incident happened in Chicago, where the last racist redneck was last seen in the 19th century. The incident happened in a part of town that caters to deviants like Smollett, not MAGA hat wearing Trump supporters. Again, only a nut would accept the story at face value.

Similarly, once the hoax was made plain, I knew the believers on the Left, by which I mean everyone on the Left, would go through the usual phases that they always pass through when confronting disconfirmation. Initially they would lash out at doubters, calling them blasphemers. As the truth was slowly revealed, they would search for explanations to excuse Smollett. Finally, once it was confirmed to be a hoax, they would enter the phase where they admit it was a hoax, but claim these crimes are common.

This brilliant post on the topic goes into more detail, but the general explanation is that these people need to be reinforced in their beliefs and they need to reinforce one another in their beliefs. Progressivism is a social system, as well as a set of beliefs. The believer is not just defined by his beliefs, but by his association with others. Much of the signaling we see from them is not intended for us. Like fireflies blinking in the dusk, they are signaling to one another. These hoaxes provide the opportunity for it.

The people in this photo, for example, don’t care about the details of the case or whether it is even true. They play make believe for a living, so facts grounded in observable reality are not important to them. This Smollett thing was like a stage that suddenly popped up in the public square, allowing them to climb aboard and perform. What they will remember and what their coreligionists will remember, is that they were on board early and stood strong for a victim of those terrible white people on the other side of the wall.

It’s why these people not only fall for these hoaxes, but amplify them. You can be sure that many of the people in that photo have fallen for many of these hoaxes. The little Jewish guy, front row, third from the right, is a barking at the moon anti-white. He really believes Hitler is about to pop out from the bushes and carry him off to a camp. The next time whites are libeled in some way, he will be right there showing his support for the anti-white, regardless of how silly the claim. He is consumed with a hatred of white people.

That’s the thing though. Not only do these people keep falling for these hoaxes, these hoaxes are becoming more common and more outlandish. This one is so absurd, it would not pass muster with Hollywood script writers. The University of Virginia rape hoax was also laughably absurd. In other words, instead of these hoaxes leading to greater skepticism, these hoaxes result in greater credulity on the Left. It’s as if each one is an appetizer, wetting the appetite of the believers, who are desperate for the real thing.

The other side of this dynamic is the civic nationalists are close to a frenzy, trying to prove the next hoax false, confident that this time will do the trick. The Left, confronted with the reality of these hoaxes, will throw down their weapons and finally admit, that yeah, these things are fake. The fear of the secret invisible Hitler people is all nonsense. During every one of these, the CivNats start blinking to one another, working the details of the puzzle, confident that their “eureka!” moment is at hand.

It is a good example of the central challenge of this age. Guys like Steve Sailer truly believe they can turn the tide with facts and reason. He probably has 25 posts on this Smollett thing. He has been working the hate-hoax angle for close to two decades now, yet here we are anyway. He is no closer to unriddling the hate hoax puzzle than he was twenty years ago. If anything, the hoaxes have become more outlandish. Even so, he will keep trying to use facts and reason to address a matter of belief.

No doubt, some civic nationalist types would argue that their project is not about convincing the Left. It is about demonstrating to normal people that these people are dishonest, crazy or even dangerous. In other words, using facts and reason is not about countering belief, but about convincing the rational. The trouble is the Left is undefeated against this strategy and it permits them to own the moral high ground. In this case, they were the ones defending the victim against those evil whites.

Culture wars are moral wars. It is about imposing your morality on the other side, no matter what it takes. It’s why radicals have had no qualms about using violence against their perceived enemies. It’s why Antifa exists. They’re not trying to prove their case or win arguments. They are about clubbing the doubters into submission. From the perspective of the Left, this Smollett affair was a big win. They reinforced an important point They control the morality and they will impose it on society.

A Plague Of Nonsense

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In American mythology, enemies of the peopel come to the attention of the state because they are doing something that worries the state. The people who got in trouble with the Soviets, for example, were either freedom fighters, skeptics of communism or religious people just trying to practice their faith. In other words, the person getting the business from the state, were both heretics and a specific threat. The state rationally picked them out from among the population for special treatment by the goons of the system.

The truth is, there is a great deal of chance involved in these situations. The Chinese have always understood this. The Chinese curse, “May you be recognized by people in high places” captures the serendipity that is always part of government. There are minor nuisances, who get caught up in the government dragnet, while others, who are very serious subversives escape attention.  Sometimes it is simply a matter of pissing off the right person, or wrong person. Sometimes it’s just bad luck or bad timing.

Ideological government, either the hard type like the Soviets or the soft sort like we have in America, needs enemies. More specifically, it needs examples. In order to reinforce the rightness of the civic religion, they need to demonstrate the wrongness of heresy. That means the demand for heretics is constant. Finding heretics one at a time is expensive, so it soon becomes a bulk operation. They cast the net, pull in some trouble makers, throw away the small ones and keep the useful ones.

Social media has proven to be excellent fishing waters for this sort of operation. The need to preen and signal, means left-wing fanatics flood these sites. They become chum, attracting the sorts who enjoy criticizing Progressive piety. Every once in a while, a heretic gets caught up in the nets and is hauled aboard for defenestration. It’s no surprise that doxing, the tactic of leftists where they harass heretics at their work and school, almost always starts on social media. Swim near the trawlers, risk getting caught in the net.

There seems to be a corollary to this practice in the realm of official propaganda. The fire hose of fake news, conspiracy tales, and selective reporting is also an economical way of solving the propaganda issue. Instead of spending time and money coming up with credible narratives and high production values, the ideological state can simply reduce the verity of all social information to zero. If everyone comes to believe everything they hear is false, the critics of the regime have no way to convince the public.

Think of it this way. Imagine JFK was actually assassinated by a secret cabal within the government. In order to avoid detection they could find a sucker to setup for the crime, but there’s the risk someone could notice defects in the narrative. What if the sap they selected has an alibi or some physical evidence contradicts the story? The other choice is to try and erase all evidence pointing to the conspiracy, but this is hard to do. There’s always a few bread crumbs that point investigators in the right direction.

A third option is to create and promote a wide range of conspiracy theories that are plausible, but lack proof. This not only muddies the waters, it attracts the sorts of people who seek attention. Before long all of the Mike Cernovich types are promoting their favorite theory of the crime. Not only does this obscure the facts of the crime, it makes the real theory seem just as nutty as the fake conspiracies. The very act of trying to identify who killed Kennedy disqualifies the person doing it.

This is a pattern, by the way, we see with lots of unsolved mysteries. The official inquiry comes up dry or seems to lack official support, so there is a flood of conspiracy theories by professional conspiracy mongers. Obama’s birth certificate is a great example. Team Obama let that linger, because they wanted people talking about the birth certificate, rather than the gaping holes in Obama’s official biography. Before long, anyone puzzling over his backstory was cast as a “birther” and laughed off the stage.

Maybe that’s what has happened to our media over the last few decades. The ideological state no longer has to sell a credible narrative. They just have to allow the fake news to flood the zone so that the public assumes everything is fake, even the people criticizing the ideologues in charge. In a zero trust society, the value of subversion falls to zero, but the value of the institutions grows geometrically. Therefore, the people controlling the institutions increase their power, even as they become less credible.

That’s not to say the people in charge sorted this in advance. That would be a conspiracy theory of its own. No, these things may simply evolve. In the late stages of the Soviet Union, dark humor about the near total lack of trust in Russian society was common. It’s probably not an accident that some of those jokes are making a comeback in modern America, particularly in response to the Russia conspiracies. In a world where there is no truth and no one can trust anything, all you can do is laugh.

February Grab Bag

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Maybe it is just me, but there seems to be an edge to everything of late, like everyone is a little more mad about things than normal. I feel it in myself, which is why I have decided to decouple from the news entirely next week. I suspect it has something to do with the Jusse Smollett story. Not in a direct way, as no one is surprised by the result. Well, the media is pretending to be surprised, but no one else. This is one of those events where there is the above the waterline story and a below the waterline story.

The above the waterline part is the fact that everyone knew it was a hoax and the people in charge bothered to acknowledge it. Usually these hoaxes get broomed and the only people following them are the weirdos who cater to the woke Dirt People. Without Steve Sailer, no one would know about Haven Monahan. Heck, most people still don’t get the reference or they have forgotten it, along with the whole story. That’s how good the media is at controlling the minds of most Americans. Propaganda works.

The below the waterline story is that Smollett is going to get away with it. Some BoomerCons will wave around this petty charge as vindication, like they are doing with Trump’s fake wall declaration, but people on our side know better. If it had been two white guys attacking a black, they would be facing life in prison. This clown, who cost the city millions and perpetuated this blood libel against whites, will end up with probation and a boost in his career. Notice he has not been fired from his job yet.

A growing anger is the price for people becoming aware of what’s happening to them, but it makes for a tense environment. A lot of CivNats are slowly realizing they have been conned, duped by people they trusted. This is not America, at least not the America with laws, rules and equal justicet. We’re a lot closer to where the Russians were 40 years ago than where America was 40 years ago. That’s both scary and infuriating, but that’s inevitable as our people wake up from the American Dream.

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. I have been de-platformed by Spotify, because they feared I was poisoning the minds of their Millennial customers.

This Week’s Show

Contents

Direct Download, The iTunes Page, Google Play Link, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

https://youtu.be/fsQBNZoOkPI

A Rambling Post About Sportsball

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If you have ever followed sportsball, the one thing you have surely noticed is that some franchises never win, while others win a lot. In America, the New York Yankees are the example of perennial winners. In English soccer, Manchester United is the club that is the example of consistent excellence. The opposite is true as well. In America, the organization best known for futility is the Cleveland Browns. It’s not just that they never win anything. They find hilarious ways to lose and embarrass themselves.

The question is why? In the case of baseball, market size has always been assumed to be the main driver. With unlimited budgets for payroll and player development, the teams with deep pockets could dominate. The Yankees operate in New York. The Dodgers are in Los Angeles. Over the years, the correlation between winning and market size has been strong enough for most people to assume that’s the reason. Of course, the Mets and Cubs stand out as stark exceptions, so there is more to it.

In other sports, like English soccer, the market share answer does not apply. Manchester is the thirst largest metropolitan area, behind Birmingham and London, but it is a fifth the size of London and much poorer. The dominance of Manchester is a lot like the success of the Green Bay Packers in American football. Not quite to that extreme, but Man U has had much more success than the Packers. While having a big market helps in all sports, the rules and some other factors often neutralize the advantage.

One area where this “something” else is easier to notice is in how teams hire their front office people. The reason the Cleveland Browns, for example, lose all the time is they hire stupid people to run their club. The New England Patriots, in contrast, hired a cerebral coach, paid him well and staffed their front office with smart people. They also make sure the culture of the organizations rewards the smart and punishes the stupid. When these people leave for better jobs, they often fail in their new organizations.

While it seems obvious, the reason franchises have sustained success or failure is due mostly to their organizational IQ. This is most obvious in baseball. The Oakland A’s are credited with being the first team to employ statistics in player evaluation. Moneyball, as it is called, seeks to find the best value in the market for talent, but also the most useful players in the market. The stat-geeks have re-evaluated the stats in baseball and created new metrics to measure a player’s contribution to winning games.

What the Oakland A’s learned is they could get players that were 90% as good as the big stars, for 30% of the investment. That’s a bit of an exaggeration, but it is a useful way of thinking of it. They understood that a player who walks a lot is more valuable than a guy who strikes out a lot, but also hits for a high average. The former is on-base more often, so he contributes more runs than the latter. Hitting home runs is a good way to get a big contract and sell tickets, but getting on base is what counts most.

Now, all of the big clubs have armies of stat-geeks doing the moneyball thing. The Boston Red Sox have the godfather of stat geeks, Bill James, on their payroll. The use of stats has become so pervasive, it is changing the game. Managers no longer make decisions during games. Instead, they consult probability charts and select from the options the front office created before the game. It’s an odd form of computer chess. Instead of humans controlling the robot pieces, it’s the robots controlling the human pieces.

The fact is, winning is about avoiding error. Since the Greeks this has been understood, so why is this not a universal part of all sport? The owner of the Cleveland Browns is probably a smart guy. He’s rich enough to own a sportsball team, so he may not be a genius, but he is pretty smart. Why does he not hire a team of behavior scientists to study winning and create personality models for the various jobs within the organization? He could hire people to model how the Patriots run their organization.

It does not have to be a sci-fi version of this stuff to work. The team of analysts could come up with the five facts common to all failed coaches in the Browns organization and then compare that to the least successful coaches in the game. Odds are, they will find some commonalities. Knowing what does not work, they could simply avoid hiring coaches with any of those qualities. That would not guarantee success, but maybe it eliminates embarrassing, catastrophic failure. Better is better.

Sports organizations are systems, so the tools used in system analysis should apply to sports teams, corporations, political movements and so forth. American business employs continuous improvement techniques to fine tune daily operations. Some are more committed than others and some things work better than others, but fixing small things tends to have the greatest impact on performance. This is true in most systems. Fixing a simple error in a line of code can greatly increase system performance.

Despite this well-known reality, human organizations are the least likely to embrace empirical techniques. Politics is the most obvious. If the parties simply required an IQ test for party membership, they would save themselves a lot of trouble. Sports franchises tinker around with this stuff, but they have never embraced it. Even big corporations seem to drift from a focus on incremental improvement in various types of magic. Google is now a cult of sorts, which is how they make blunders like this one.

The point of this post, if there is one, is that there is something that prevents otherwise smart people, like sportsball owners, from using well known techniques to improve their organizations. The result is a repetition of unforced errors. Sportsball owners are hyper-competitive, yet they are often allergic to considering concepts and tactics that work in other organizations. It is only after an innovator proves it can work that we see the rest jump on board and start aping what worked for them.

An even stranger thing about sportsball teams is that this institutional blundering attracts owners prone to the same sort of blundering. These bad franchises come up for sale and the new owners turn out to be as accident prone as the previous ones. In fact whole cities seem to attract losers in this area. Again, Cleveland is a great example. All of their sportsball teams are terrible and the owners are some of the worst in sport. Maybe there really is something in the water there that causes this.

Anyway, it is something reformers and rebels should probably consider when plotting how to attack the Death Star of modern culture. Maybe that silly plot device from Star Wars has a grain of truth to it. The bad guys left the back door to the Death Star open, because in the end, they were the Cleveland Browns of space villains. Perhaps all villains leave a window open at some point. Maybe size makes organizations stupid and then exploitable to those with subversion on their mind.

Spooky Stuff

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One of the things that make dystopian science fiction fun for the audience is the understanding that it will never happen. It could happen, but only a long time in the future, when everyone seeing the warning is dead. Worst case, the “boot stomping the face” stuff happens when you’re ready to kick the bucket, so you’ll live to see it, but never really have to experience it. This adds a camp fire quality to it, allowing the creator to lay it on a bit thick to make his points. Horror movies often work the same way.

The same is true about doom and gloom in public commentary. The market predictor guy on TV, who thinks the market is about to tank, is not getting much traction if he claims a mild downturn is coming. If he warns that fire will rain down from the sky and Lucifer will rise from his pit somewhere on Wall Street, then people pay attention. The people consuming such content do so with an understanding that it’s not really going to be that bad, but it is kind of fun pretending it will be as you stock up on MRE’s.

You see this with the bogeyman of AI and his posse called automation. Any day now, so the story goes, the algorithms will come alive, enslave the population and replace every job with a robot. What usually follows, depending upon your inclination, is either the libertarian fantasy of a world where everyone smokes weed and plays hacky-sack or the dystopian sci-fi vision of a world like The Matrix or The Terminator. Most people assume it will not happen, but it is fun to pretend it will happen.

Of course, the one thing that rarely gets mentioned is that the future is never the nightmare people imagine. We know this because we are currently living in the nightmarish future imagined in the past. Orwell’s 1984 was nothing like our 1984. In fact, our 1984 was a lot better than Orwell’s 1948. London was still in rubble at the point. Food was still limited and general living standards were poor. Relative to life in 1984 London, life in 1948 was about as bad as Orwell imagined forty years or so on the future.

Probably the most relevant test case we have for this is 20th century Marxism. China and Russia underwent massive social experiments attempting to usher in the Marxist future of a worker’s paradise. At times, life was pretty awful for people in both countries. The purges of Stalin and the Cultural Revolution of Mao were dystopian nightmares for many of the people at the time. Yet, most buggered their way through. Their present was not our future. Instead, our future and theirs was our present, which is not so bad.

Still, the example of China and Russia show that even though things tend to work out for humanity in the long run, the short run can be quite terrible. It means were probably better off worrying about what’s right in front of us, rather than what lies far down the road. A good example is what is coming from behavioral science and genetics. The former is about establishing statistical patterns of human behavior in order to model it. The latter is about finding genes to explain the features of life, including human life.

On the behavioral side, China’s social credit system is a great example of the spooky future stuff happening in the present. The same tools China is using are now being applied to social media and public discourse in the West. The British cop sent out to investigate an offensive tweet is applying the same techniques China is using when they throttle internet access of dissidents. It’s a combination of shame and reduced access, intended to alter the behavior of people viewed as disruptive.

The Twitter cops are not just people sitting around reading tweets. The social media giants are using techniques from behavioral science to narrow the focus to those most likely to be a problem. China’s social credit system works the same way. It’s not predicative in the narrow sense, but more of a profile. When the cumulative score of someone’s activity reaches a certain point, they gets closer examination. The social media giants use this same approach to throttle users with the so-called shadow ban.

On the genetics side of the dystopian present, this will become increasingly common as the science gets better and cheaper. Future parents will soon have a chance to increase their child’s cognitive score, so to speak, rather than leave it to chance. What parent would not want their child to be smart or tall or handsome? If science can increase the odds of that happening, people will embrace it. Think of it this way. If science could tell you which fertilized egg was most likely to be the best, which would you choose?

Of course, Stephen Hsu cannot guarantee your child will be a genius. In fact, he can’t guarantee anything as no such guarantee is enforceable. His clients will not know if his technique worked until their child is well along in development and no one is going to enforce a return policy for children. That said, it is not about guarantees. It is about probabilities. What these techniques offer is better odds of getting the best genetic mix from the parents. It’s like moving closer to the target at the shooting range.

If that’s not enough, genetic research is slowing moving toward a time when minor corrections after the fact are possible. It’s unlikely, highly unlikely, that science will ever be able to rewrite the code of a living human, but they are starting to tinker. These techniques will no doubt be applied to artificial insemination, in combination with what Stephen Hsu is offering. Pick the best embryo, make a few tweak and the odds of your child being a combination of the best his parents contributed goes way up.

None of this is part of some dystopian future. It is spooky stuff happening right now. The most worrisome is probably the stuff coming from behavior science, as it allows for that dystopian future, where the authorities act as puppet masters. The genetics stuff is less spooky and less worrisome for now. Still, the point is we have plenty of monsters walking around in the present. If we want to be worried or have a reason to put away some more MRE’s, you just have to spend time on Twitter or talk to Stephen Hsu.

The End Of Atheism

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If you are over the age of 40, perhaps a bit older, you have lived long enough to see a great fad get going, peak and then fade away completely. Lots of fads run their course in a few months, obviously, but social movements tend to build slowly and then stick around for a while, before disappearing down the memory hole. One of those fads is atheism, which had a good run in the 80’s and 90’s. It started to peter out in the 90’s, had a brief revival in the aughts, but now seems to be headed to oblivion.

The so-called “new atheists” are not ready to throw in the towel on their reason to exist, as it were, but that’s to be expected. Harris and Dennett moved all their chips into the middle of the table with the atheism stuff. It got them the attention they desired, so as a gambler will wear a diamond pinky ring to recall his one big score, these guys still proudly wear their atheism. All of them have moved onto other things, but they will expound upon their hatred of religion if the crowd demands it.

Of course, anytime the word “new” gets attached to something old, it means that old thing is now dead. It also means that old thing had some serious internal defect that eventually killed it. The “new right” made an appearance when it was clear Conservative Inc. was just a ruthless money racket. The previous iteration of “new right” appeared in the 70’s when everyone agreed the old right was dead. The reason “new atheism” got going is everyone agreed that regular old atheism was creepy and weird.

The central defect of atheism, old and new, is it is an entirely negative western identity and entirely dependent on Christianity. Specifically, it requires people of some status to defend Christianity and the Christian belief in the super natural. Atheism has always been the oxpecker of mass movements. Everything about it relies on its host both tolerating it and thriving on its own. It’s why atheism has had its spasms of success when Christianity in America has had a revival, as in the 80’s and the 2000’s.

Atheists will deny this, of course. They will argue, as Dennett often does, that the steep decline of Christianity is proof their arguments were superior. The reason they no longer talk about their thing is they won and their enemy is dead. The fact that there are plenty of Muslims and crackpot feminist airheads around spouting magical oogily-boogily never seems to get their attention for some reason. The only guy to venture into this area was Dawkins, but the Prog quickly reminded him who pays his bills.

That’s always been the tell with atheism. Belief in something as insane as male privilege or implicit whiteness should get their attention. After all, these are not just beliefs in the supernatural, they are primitive beliefs in the supernatural. Men of the classical period had more plausible and complex beliefs than people like Amy Harmon. She is a click away from demanding human sacrifice. Yet, the new atheists were never much interest in those magical beliefs. They were too busy hounding the last Christians.

That’s another tell. Atheism has always been a popular pose on the Left, because it was a useful signal. The bad whites loved their boom sticks and sky gods. The good whites rejected all those crazy beliefs. It’s why atheists tended to focus on the mainstream of Christianity, like Catholics and mainline Protestant churches. Mormons were always an easy target. They avoided the Jews and black Baptists. Sure, once in while a zinger against the tribe would be tossed in, but the enemy was always white Christians.

The decline on atheism is a good example of the perils of negative identity. When you define yourself as being in opposition to someone or something, you inevitably become a slave to it. Your very existence depends on it. As the main Christian churches collapse in scandal and bizarre attempts to move Left, the enemies for atheists to attack are getting more difficult to find. Attacking Christians is like beating up a puppy. Only the severely mentally disturbed think Christians have any power today.

The other thing working against atheism is it has been mostly male. That’s an interesting thing, given that the American Atheists was created by a woman in the 60’s. Then again, Madalyn Murray O’Hair was just a cat’s paw for the usual suspects. Her role was to be the point the spear in the war to decouple Christianity from American civic and cultural life. Since then, atheism has been a male thing. Given the declining status of males on the Left, particularly white males, it is no surprise that atheism is dying.

Given the state of affairs in the West and the crippling decline in the Christian churches, it is hard to see atheism having another revival. Christianity appears to morphing into a private, bespoke thing in order to survive outside the Progressive orthodoxy. That makes it a worthless enemy for atheists. You can never know, of course, but it looks like public Christianity is done for. That means atheism is done for as well, unless it moves onto Judaism or Progressivism and that will never be allowed.