Monthly Archives: May 2019

An Update On Europe

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With so much news coming from Europe this week, I thought a show about European politics would be a good way to kick off the summer. Once a quarter I do a show about international topics. These are some of the more popular podcasts, as I get a lot of traffic from Europe, relative to normal. Our friends over the sea pay a lot of attention to us, but they also want to know what we are thinking about them. Even though our understanding of the world is not always the best, it matter the most.

I’ve made this point before, but I think we can learn a lot about the politics of this thing by watching how the European dissidents go about their efforts. They have different political systems and some advantages we lack, but they are a bit more advanced when it comes to organizing and advertising themselves. They have done a better job handling the “freaks and weirdos” problem, for example. It makes sense for our side to keep an eye on Europe and steal the good ideas that can work in America.

The main thing the Euros have going for them is they have natural identities. They know what it means to be French or Finnish. The usual suspects are trying to play the same game there as they do hear, muddying the waters by claiming random Africans are English, but it’s not fooling many people. Europe has been identitarian since the first humans encountered Neanderthals. The only people willing to accept the fluid definition of ethnicity are crazy people and foreigners looking to game the system.

For the show this week, I’m mostly sticking to the election related stuff. The EU parliament elections are mostly a show, as the EU parliament is useless, but it does provide an insight into what people are thinking. It is meaninglessness allows people to vote their current sentiment, so it is like a massive opinion poll. With nothing on the line and no traditional loyalties to consider, people can be more honest. It’s not a perfect survey of opinion, but it does provide some useful insights about attitudes.

To support my work, please contribute 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

Contents

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

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

https://youtu.be/DPlTzntNspk

Dear Candidates: Here Is What White Men Want

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During election season, I always cringe when I see candidates visiting a factory in the Midwest or taking staged photos with “regular white people” so they can look like they are one of us. These shallow symbolic gestures are not a substitute for meaningful engagement with white voters. And candidates should know that we see right through these campaign stunts.

Candidates and their campaigns are comfortable talking at white people, but few want to talk to us. This limits our ability to influence their decisions and policies. And it’s a bad strategy at a time when white people, white men in particular, form the base of the Republican Party, are its most loyal voters and mobilize other people to go to the polls.

That is a very slightly reworked version of this piece, which was posted in the opinion section of the New York Times. Obviously, no mainstream publication would ever publish a column that makes the explicit case on behalf of white men, as that would be racist and racism is very bad. So bad, in fact, that the major newspapers publish explicitly anti-white columns and articles every day. In fact, they regularly publish hate hoaxes, as the number of actual “hate crimes” in America falls well below demand.

The funny thing is though, the major news sites regularly post the demands of increasingly narrow identity groups, without putting much thought into whether they are harming their own cause. For example, that NY Times column starts with the claim, “We set out to prove that black people are not a monolith”, but then goes on to present evidence that black people are pretty much a monolith. In fact, the first chart confirms everything dissidents say about black identity and culture in America.

Let’s assume for a second that the Progressive narrative has some validity and that white men control society with their white privilege and refuse to share. Presumably, the point of this endless proselytizing in favor of ending white male privilege is to convince white men to let everyone else into power. If that is the intent, then it would make sense to know something about white men, other than the angry fantasies cooked up by bitter university feminists. Perhaps a poll of white men would be useful?

Even if that is a bridge too far, just assuming white men are not stupid would be a good starting people. For example, the NY Times piece has the claim, “For every dollar white men earn, black women, for example, earn 65 cents, whereas white women earn 82 cents.” Every white man knows why this statistic is nonsense and he knows the implication is a lie. The writer of that piece is probably too dumb to grasp multivariate analysis, but most white men do understand it.

In fact, it is long past time for the people in charge to just assume white people in general, male and female, are wise to this whole game. The whole point of that NY Times piece is to demand more gibs for black activists. It’s right there in the last few paragraphs. The writer moans about the Democrats not spending more money on black voters than white voters. Most white people know the reality of race in America, even if no one is allowed to talk about it in public. We get it. We know.

While we’re on the topic of the gibs, here’s a suggestion for how the usual suspects can better engage with white people. Just put a number on it. We know you are working up to the reparations stuff. Whites know and are increasingly prepared to do it. The thing is, there has to be a number that puts an end to the blood libel. We’ll write the check, but you have to stop complaining about how good we made it for you. We also know you’ll never agree to that condition. It’s all about the blood libel. We know. We all know.

Another reason this will never happen is the people in charge need to believe the fantasy they have created to explain modern America. That’s something dissidents often fail to appreciate. They go down the rabbit hole of reductionism, assuming this stuff is part of a plot by the usual suspects. In reality, the people in charge have embraced anti-racism as a fundamental part of their identity. Opposing white people, but particularly white people like us, is what gets them out of bed in the morning.

You can be sure that after the team of NY Times interns, mostly Jewish and Asian women from Columbia and NYU, finished writing this essay for the alleged writer, the editorial staff hugged and cried, while it was read out loud. They really believe there are the new abolitionists fighting the evil white man. This ridiculous post and the hate hoaxes are not an evil plot to gaslight us. They are part of the endless revival meeting that is modern American Progressivism. These posts are sermons, not agit-prop.

Since the title of this post suggests white men have a list of suggestions for politicians, we may as well finish with some ideas. The most obvious suggestion is the office holders start talking about white people. President Trump, the alleged white nationalist, tweets endlessly about everyone except white people. He will go on at length about the employment numbers for one-legged ginger Mexicans or how he has let thousands of black criminals out of prison. He has yet to mention white people in a tweet.

That will never happen, of course, but while we’re working on the fantasy list, how about the rest of you accept the fact that without white men, you’re back in the Stone Age. It sounds harsh, but the hard truth is, without white people, the NY Times editorial board is either back in the Levant begging Mohamed for mercy or back in their home country wondering if the hunt was successful. Black people would revert to the Neolithic if white men suddenly went away. A little gratitude would be nice.

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The Little Fights

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An old joke about libertarians is that they are fond of saying, “That works very well in practice, but how does it work in theory?” It’s an old joke that goes back before such a thing as libertarianism existed. It is often used to zing the excessively intellectual. The joke itself is a twist on the fact that strategy, based in theory, often fails miserably in the field. The world of theory is neat and tidy, while the real world is messy. Ideologues can’t grasp this distinction and live only in theory, which is the point of the joke.

No doubt, libertarians will take exception to this characterization, but this truth is an issue faced by all outsider politics. What often makes them outsiders is an excessive adherence to ideology or to a set of narrow demands. Their unwillingness to compromise makes them unappealing to most people. The various green movements are a good example of theory clashing with reality. You can talk people into being more environmentally conscious, but people are not giving up their cars to please mother earth.

Some on the alt-right suffer from this malady. The reaction by some of them to the British election smacks of that old joke about practice versus theory. Here’s Mike Enoch criticizing Nigel Farage as a gatekeeper, while offering a defense of Carl Benjamin, of all people. Richard Spencer went down the same road when he was on the same YouTube show this week. In both cases, they jam the results into their preferred moral framework, rather than analyzing the results in the proper context.

Farage is a single issue guy, who is first and foremost a politician. He is not a strategist or a political theorist. He is a pitch man, selling a simple idea. Britain needs to get out of the EU and begin functioning like a normal country again. Beyond that, he has no strong opinions on much of anything. In fact, he is willing to embrace the popular side of anything in order to eliminate it as an obstacle. His forays into meta-politics are always with an eye on influencing practical politics, which is where is he is best suited.

The way to think of this is to consider the doughnut shop. Political theory is a debate about how retail commerce, like donut shops, fits in with a preferred social organization. Are doughnut shop keepers bourgeois flunkies of the capital class, oppressing the proletariat, or are they an organic resistance to central planning? In the world of political theory, the choice of signage is not a topic of debate. The closest things come to the actual doughnut shop is having the debate in the doughnut shop.

Meta-politics is the debate and discussion of actual doughnut shops and the various ways of making doughnuts. This is the same as comparing the merits of anarcho-capitalism with other types of libertarianism. The practical benefits are described and compared, but in a largely abstract way. After all, the relative merit of one policy compared to another is similar to the comparison of one type of doughnut versus another type of doughnut. Often the people doing the comparing matter more than the comparison.

Finally, politics is the act of selling doughnuts. The guy running the shop is not all that concerned about the propriety of selling more cream filled versus plain, as his primary task is to sell doughnuts. In theory, having 85 types of doughnut on offer makes sense, but if it results in lots of waste, then having just the five most popular types is going to make more sense to the doughnut maker. This works in practice, so he is not going to care if it violate theory or rustles the jimmies of the food critics.

In this regard, a guy like Farage is the doughnut maker. He is focused on winning over as many people as he can to his single issue. Politics is a sales game, where the salesman is always trying to figure out the needs and motivations of the voter. His politics, therefore, have to be flexible enough to fit many situations. The good salesman removes all of the reasons to say no. He attacks the objections, rather than just pitch the benefits. In politics, the game is to avoid disqualifiers so the voter focuses only on the pitch.

That’s why Farage’s new party won big, while Carl Benjamin, Sargon of Akkad, and UKIP were humiliated at the pols. Farage is a likable guy, who avoids taking controversial positions on inconsequential issues. He maintains his focus on the one issue that matters to him, Brexit. Benjamin is a smarmy ideologue who never misses a chance to step on a rake. He embarrassed himself and anyone associated with him, by confirming all of the claims made by his critics. It turns out that there is such a thing as bad publicity.

The alt-right guys will contend that winning is pointless if it does not result in a change in policy or a change in the political culture. That is a fair point and something anyone voting Republican the last 30 years can understand. The GOP has won many elections, but delivered very little to their voters. In the case of the British election, this analysis does not apply as the vote was not an actual election. It was a test of the political atmosphere in Britain that will influence the upcoming struggle to find a new Prime Minister.

It’s why calling Farage a gatekeeper or part of the problem is pretty dumb. The election results give support to the Brexit hardliners in the Tory party and give cover to the moderates, who can now side with Brexit. Britain leaving the EU has enormous downstream consequences for nationalist movements all over the continent. The British leaving the EU strips away the taboo. It is no longer unthinkable for other countries to consider leaving the EU as an option to being ruled by Brussels.

The point of all this is that what we saw in Britain is a good example of why outsider politics remains on the fringe. Ideologues can’t understand why candidates don’t run as ideologues, refusing to compromise on anything. The alt-right guys want candidates to run as open and avowed racists. In the case of Farage, they wanted him to talk about the Paki rape gangs and knife wielding Muslims, rather than his main issue. They simply don’t get why valiantly losing is a bad idea, so they criticize guys like Farage.

It’s also why the Left has been so wildly successful, compared to their numbers. It has been popular for generations to accuse liberals of being unrealistic dreamers, but in reality they operate like cold blooded pragmatists. They win every small fight so it makes it easier to win the next small fight. They are like rats gnawing at the support cables of the status quo, knowing that one day the cables will snap. They never confuse political philosophy with retail politics and they never lose sight of larger goals when in small fights.

Farage winning the election is a small victory, but that’s what it takes to change the culture, winning the small battles. It is the cumulative effect of changing a mind here and a mind there, of normalizing a bit our stuff here and anathematizing some of the orthodoxy over there. It’s messy and boring, which is why ideologues don’t like it, but it is the only way dissident politics can change the culture and eventually change politics. What our side needs is more guys like Farage and fewer rigid ideologues scolding him.

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Echo & The Cucky Men

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One of the strange aspects of the Obama years was how much of what they did was an effort to address old wounds that still haunted the Left. Health care reform is the obvious example. The Left never got over how Bill Clinton threw the Left overboard after Hillary’s health care debacle led to the 1994 election wipe-out. The Obama effort was all about addressing that old wound. The ultimate product looked like the result of a revenge fantasy, mostly because it was about addressing those old wounds.

It was not just health care. The entirety of the Obama administration was about the past, despite his endless jabbering about the glorious future. Their dealings with Iraq and Afghanistan were mostly about “proving” Bush was wrong and they were right about how to respond to 9/11. Their Iran policy was a do-over of the Carter years and their Russia policy was a do-over of the 1980’s. They even pitched Obama at one point as the Progressive answer to Reagan, He was their Ronald Reagan.

It’s not just the Left playing the old records and dreaming of better days. The 2016 Trump campaign was a WWE version of the Reagan campaign of 1980. The slogan “Make American Great Again” was borrowed from the Gipper. He ran on the slogan “Let’s make America great again” in his successful 1980 presidential campaign. It’s pretty clear Trump intends to use some version of “It’s Morning In America” in his reelection campaign next year. This campaign ad will feature a panda, rather than a grizzly.

Of course, his presidency has been a call back to past events as well. The seditious conspiracy against him by the FBI and CIA is an echo of what the Left accused Nixon of plotting back in the 1970’s. Both sides are replaying the past as a do-over. Team Trump is going win the Watergate this time, while the Left is sure Trump is going to pull off his face at any moment and reveal himself to be Tricky Dick. In this version, to keep with the current age, Peter Strzok is the soy-man version of G. Gordon Liddy.

The endless echoes of politics past is sure to continue, as we see in the Democratic presidential field. The only two people talking about the present are Gabbard and Yang, both of whom will be ushered off the stage by Labor Day. The rest all sound like museum exhibits from previous eras. Joe Biden is actually running on the slogan “Make America Normal Again.” That sounds a lot like Carter’s campaign in 1976, after Nixon and Watergate, where he promised to restore dignity to politics.

Politics is always a repeat of the past, to some degree, but what makes this age a weird echo is debates themselves. The biggest issues facing the West are never discussed, outside of dissident circles. Trump ran on immigration and trade, but no one talks about those anymore. The Democrats could be running on the student debt issue or the crisis facing the young people of the middle-class. Instead they are talking about socialism, as if it is this brand new idea that has never been tried.

One reason for this entirely backward looking perspective is demographics. Both political parties are built to compete for the votes of Baby Boomers, who remain the largest identifiable cohort. The Boomers are entering the last turn of their race, so inevitably they are sentimental and nostalgic. The fact that the most likely contest in 2020 is between an octogenarian and a septuagenarian, both white and both male, will allow Baby Boomer voters to feel like they are still young and hip.

That’s probably the single biggest cultural problem facing America today. The Baby Boom generation is not going to age gracefully. Instead of picking which one of their kids will take their keys away, they will keep a white-knuckled grip on the wheel until the country goes over the cliff. Nancy Pelosi should be in a rest home right now. Instead she wanders around the capital in her bathrobe and slippers, the third most powerful person in the Imperial government, unable to remember her own name.

The blame is not all on the Boomers. As America becomes majority-minority, the cost of cobbling together a coalition goes up. Bringing blacks and angry Jewish feminists together into a coalition is near impossible. Delivering anything to the white middle-class means standing in front of the open sewer that is Progressive morality. Multicultural America is an ungovernable riot of competing interests, so it is a lot easier to go the nostalgia route and court the white Baby Boomers. It’s easy and fun.

There’s also the fact that no one wants to face up to the truth of the current situation in present day America. Inviting in 50 million strangers was a bad idea. Fixing it means telling most of them to go home. Civil Rights was arguably noble and decent, but the downstream result was a disaster. Bringing back free association is too scary for the soft men and unstable women of the ruling class. Our political class is mostly cucks and kooks, unable and unwilling to muster anything resembling courage.

That’s where we are now. America is a country ruled by cucks who are afraid of the future, so they rummage around in the past. They’re like children putting on shows for their parents, wearing their clothes and singing their songs. It’s all echoes of the past and cucking to current fads. It is an entirely useless ruling elite that will have to be wiped away, before we can face the future. Barring an asteroid strike and societal collapse, it means waiting for the great Baby Boomer die off to clear the path forward.

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Activity Versus Prosperity

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An occasional topic on the dissident right is how the popular measures of the economy have no relevance to the daily lives of people. Andrew Yang has picked up on this and talks about the need for new measures. For example, the Gross Domestic Product has its uses, but it says very little about the life of the typical person. What most of these popular measures tell us is how much activity there is in the economy, but they tell us very little about the prosperity of the people, which is really what matters.

This story from the Daily Mail is a good starting point for thinking about the difference between activity and prosperity in the economy. The men hired to build these mansions certainly got employment from the task. They were paid wages to do stuff, at least until the project was finished. The building of these mansions certainly added to the GDP and improved the unemployment rate. Yet, no one would look at the result and say Britain is more prosperous as a result. In fact, the opposite seems true.

This is because prosperity is not a purely material measure. When Notre Dame Cathedral burned down, the wealth of the typical Frenchman was diminished, because a part of his cultural heritage was lost. Economic activity will increase when they decide to rebuild it, but the result will not make France more prosperous. In fact, the result will only add to the cultural loss, as the people in charge will make a mockery of the original structure. Notre Dame will be another Parisian eyesore.

In fairness to economist, we can measure economic activity, but we can only sense economic prosperity. The former is like measuring wind gusts in a storm. The latter is to assess the damage done by the storm. The mistake is in assuming the former is objective while the latter is subjective. While true, to some degree, the choice of measures is always subjective. There is a reason we hear about the unemployment rate every month, but no one ever discusses the workforce participation rate.

The zeal of modern economists for measuring activity is about avoiding the topic of culture and the prosperity of the people. For example, our rulers don’t want the people debating whether it is better to pay more for goods and services provided by a local seller, versus from a global operator. This is the sort of discussion that leads to debates about who benefits and why. The people in charge want as many people in the wheel, running as fast as they can, not thinking about who? whom?

Ultimately, while activity has its value, the fundamental focus of a people is on their collective prosperity. Not the prosperity of a few, but of the whole. Venezuela is in flux, in part, because it’s overall increase in prosperity, the last two decades, has not increased the general prosperity of the people. Granted, outside forces are playing a major role, but subversion is possible because the people don’t feel they are benefiting from the system. No one has ever revolted against prosperity.

In America, social unrest is increasing, despite the increase in economic activity, because the white population senses a loss in their prosperity. Would the typical white person pay a little more for groceries if the stores were staffed with white people and the emergency room did not look like a Tijuana bus stop? From the perspective of economics, we would be poorer, but the quality of life would be much higher. It turns out that the true cost of cheap labor is the prosperity of the people.

This was always the error made by socialist of various types. Communists took it the furthest, assuming that humans were nothing more than economic units. The body count eventually disabused the Soviets of this, but the damage had been done. It will take generations to undo the damage of Bolshevism. Similarly, the Chinese have gone down the same road, thinking activity is prosperity. Their plummeting birth rate ensures that China will get old long before she gets truly prosperous.

One very important aspect of the great culture war in the West right now is a debate about activity versus prosperity. Do you want to be a guy in the ethnostate with less stuff or the guy with the latest of everything in a deracinated cosmopolitan area? Would you rather have a little less activity in order to have more of what defines you? The social capital that is a natural product of homogeneous societies has a value. We gave it up for cheap product. The question now is how much will it cost to get it back?

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The Cloud War

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After the Mueller report was released, the conventional wisdom was that, after a period of mourning by the crazies on the Left, the whole matter would be forgotten. The Russian collusion nonsense had served its purpose and now it was time to move onto figuring out who would replace Trump. The Democrats have a massive field of candidates for their nomination. This reflects the fractured nature of their coalition, so the focus would shift to sorting out how best to unify the party around a nominee.

That’s not what has happened. Instead, the Democrats are slowly inching toward impeachment, while Trump and his new consigliere are moving ahead with investigating the domestic spying scandal. Supposedly, Trump told Pelosi and Schumer he was done dealing with them until they dropped the investigations. This is probably just a lie fed to the willing media, as part of the war. Most likely, the offer to drop all of it was made by Schumer, but Trump rejected it, as he now has the better hand in this fight.

Proof of this is the decision to hand over to Bill Barr the power to release classified documents related to this scandal and other scandals as yet unknown. That last part is the real issue here. It is pretty much accepted that elements within the FBI, and most likely the CIA, conducted an illegal surveillance operation on the Trump campaign and the Trump transition team. The only decision left on that front is whether or not these people face changes or the whole thing is swept under the rug.

That last part is where things get interesting. If everyone was sure the parties in the FBI scandal were stand-up guys willing to do their time and keep quiet. This is probably over and done with by now. The trouble is, they are not stand-up guys. Worse yet, there are too many of them and too well known to be Arkancided. If they get charged, they will probably look to better-deal themselves by cooperating. What dirt they can dish is the great unknown and it may even be unknown to the Democrat leadership.

That brings us back to the order to authorize Bill Barr to release classified documents into the public. As the Conservative Treehouse guy noted, the order has some unusual features to it. Giving Barr this power is unprecedented, but that can be explained by the politics in Washington right now. The real puzzle is the inclusion of the Department of Treasury and the Department of Energy. What could the Energy Department have in its files related to the FBI scandal? What would Treasury have?

One answer lies in the story of Uranium One, which is the turd that official Washington cannot seem to flush. This is the deal that sold off uranium resources and companies to a Russian firm. The Wiki page is interesting, because it reveals just how many people were involved in this deal. Those people all seem to have connections to intelligence services in the Anglosphere. These are the same intelligence services that pressured Trump into holding off on releasing the classified documents months ago.

Of course, what this means is the Russian collusion story was just an effort to conceal the FBI spying scandal, which was an effort to cover a lot of other corruption, especially the Uranium One deal. That’s the item at the center of everything. That would explain why Treasury and Energy are on the list. It would also explain why the FBI under James Comey was so vexed by the Clinton e-mail scandal. Clinton was running a pay-for-play operation out of the State Department and a lot of people knew about it.

The question is why would everyone go along with it, but the history of the Clinton family is the story of exploiting the ambition of minor figures. The salary men in the FBI dream of getting to the top job, so why not play ball with Clinton? The vermin-like rapacity of Hillary Clinton is like something from a Faulkner novel. When it comes to corruption, she is shred, ruthless and clever. The people in Washington, however, are naive, sheltered and simple minded. They stand no chance against Hillary.

Way back in the 1990’s, a truth obvious to many people was that the Democrats, desperate to regain power, sold their souls to the Clintons. They were willing to overlook their obscene corruption, as long as they delivered. It’s turning out that the Clinton family was not just a cancer on the party, but a cancer on American politics. Like the guy who sold his soul to the devil, official Washington is now realizing it was a horrible error to take the Clinton deal. Now they are at a loss as to how to get out of it.

As an aside, the old WASP virtue of keeping low-class people out of public life was not just about snobbery. It was an understanding that people like the Clintons were like an invasive species among the upper classes. High status people did not train their young to hair-split and subvert the rules. They trained them to uphold the rules. As a result, they could never compete with the sort of people who saw rules and customs as an obstacle to their ambitions. Exclusion was a form of self-defense.

Ultimately, political scandals are always about politics. The reason any of this matters is it threatens the political order. On the one hand, the Cloud People cannot tolerate a rogue intelligence community. On the other hand, they can’t just open all of this to public view, as the public will lose respect for the political order. That’s the war going on now, between those trying to change the political order and those seeking to defend it and their privileges within it. Trump now has a new weapon in that war.

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May Grab Bag

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Summer is upon us, at least here in the United States, where Memorial Day weekend is the unofficial start of the summer. Like a lot of you, I’m looking forward to a nice relaxing weekend, so I decided to keep the show light this week. I tried to stick to topics that were not too serious. An important part of being in dissident politics is maintaining a healthy sense of humor. Otherwise, you just make yourself miserable and everyone around you miserable. If we’re doomed, at least we can enjoy the ride.

That was something Milo Yiannopoulos mentioned toward the end of this interview with Jordan Peterson. He specifically said it was the intellectual dark web types that lacked a sense of humor, but it applies to everyone on the other side of the great divide. Left-wing Progressives are vinegar drinking scolds, while so-called conservatives are too frightened to notice anything. Humor starts with noticing. A big part of what happens on this side of the great divide is noticing the ridiculousness of the age.

Milo appears to be ready for a comeback, which is probably not a terrible thing, assuming he learned from his mistakes. In that interview he does appear a bit chastened, but that could just be part of the act. When he is not talking about his imaginary self and sticks to the topic, he is quite effective. The trouble is he can’t stop talking about himself and his “self” is always some character he created to hide his real self from view. This affliction never ends well for performers.

Not having paid much attention to Jordan Peterson, I found his act a bit amusing. I’m old enough to remember when being a psychologist was a glamour job. Television shows often featured that as a profession. Then real science started to crowd out psychology and it stopped being cool. Watching Peterson, I was having flashbacks to being a kid watching TV and wondering why anyone thought you could talk someone out of being insane. The psychologist is the witch doctor of this age.

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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

Contents

  • 00:00: Opening
  • 02:00: Body Terrorism (Link)
  • 12:00: Libertarian Bashing (Link)
  • 22:00: Chesterton’s Fence (Link)
  • 32:00: The Old Time Religion (Link) (Link)
  • 37:00: Think Globally And Act Maliciously (Link)
  • 42:00: The Hate Hoax List (Link)
  • 47:00: Pusillanimous Prostitutes (Link) (Link)
  • 52:00: Opposites (Link)
  • 57:00: Closing

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

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

https://youtu.be/PqD7Ml71r64

Dancing Conspiracies

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I was listening to the TDS boys yesterday and they had on Ryan Dawson to talk about the latest development in the “Dancing Israelis” story. If you just put that term into your nearest google machine, you will know why this is now a hot topic in the conspiracy community. For a long time there has been a sub-group of 9/11 conspiracy people, who focused on the hundreds of Israeli nationals picked up in sweeps following the attack and the subsequent silence by the government on the issue.

Whenever I run across Ryan Dawson on a podcast, I start thinking about the structure and nature of conspiracy theories and the communities that grow up around them. It is one of those topics I have written about in the past. Dawson is a genuine outlier in the conspiracy world, as he has developed a style that is intended to conflict with the general conception of the conspiracy theorist. He’s the skeptical guy asking questions, while people like Alex Jones are nuts, who give skepticism a bad name.

There is, of course, a big difference between guys like Alex Jones and what we think of as a skeptic. For example, the official narrative of the RFK killing is less believable than most of the conspiracy theories around the JFK assassination. The official record contradicts itself and the testimony of people at the event. That’s skepticism rooted in fact. On the other hand, claiming that school shootings are staged, as Alex Jones has done, is crazy and a terrible thing to say, given that the victims are usually children.

The TDS boys talked at length about what the “dancing Israeli” thing means, in terms of 9/11, geopolitics and domestic politics. One of the things anti-anti-Semites get wrong about the anti-Semite community is the modern anti-Semite is not focused on his hatred of Jews. Instead, he is invested in what amounts to a conspiracy theory about Jews and their alleged control of the West. After all, if Kevin McDonald is right about everything, Jews are the master race, cleverly manipulating the rest of us for their own gain.

That is a different thing than what you see from counter-Semites, who think Jews are just a great model for the rest of us, but that the interests of Jews conflict with the interests of their host countries. There’s a lot of overlap, because both camps use the same humor and jargon. For anti-Semites, Shlomo is a super-intelligent super-villain, while for counter-Semites, Shlomo is just shorthand for Jews. This is another difference the anti-anti-Semites fail to grasp, when sputtering about this stuff.

There is a fair amount of research into conspiracy theories, but a lot of it suffers from the same defects as the subject matter. The people doing the research want to believe things about themselves in contrast to their environment. Belief in conspiracy theories appears to be driven by a need to rationalize events, a need for safety and as a way to find a comfortable social group. Conspiracy theories tend to create subcultures built around one or more conspiracy theories. It’s a community, not a theory.

That’s the thing that is missing about the research into this topic. The structure of the conspiracy is probably the result of the community that supports it. That is, some event occurs and the official narrative is either incomplete or unsatisfying to people who eventually coalesce around their doubt. At this point, the normal group dynamics kick in and the theory matures and grows in complexity. The members of the group reinforce the belief among one another, as group dynamics works toward a consensus.

Another interesting thing about conspiracy theories is they used to be on the fringe, but now they are mainstream. We are rapidly reaching the point where accepting the official narrative on anything is a sign of mental instability. The whole Russian collusion story that has convulsed our rulers for three years is a conspiracy theory that is every bit as weird as the 9/11 truther stuff. Israeli complicity in 9/11 sounds quite plausible compared to invisible men from the Kremlin altering the results of the election.

The fact that an actual conspiracy within the FBI tried to rig the last presidential election probably has a lot to do with the popularity of conspiracy theories among our rulers. One way to excuse the Obama administration’s domestic spying efforts is create an even more outlandish conspiracy. This allows Progressives to dismiss the real conspiracy, as small potatoes, and focus on the “real” conspiracy. In this light, the whole Russian collusion narrative is an elaborate coping mechanism.

Now, as far as my own view on the dancing Israeli stuff, I think it is odd that Israeli nationals were running moving companies in Boston and New York. I think it is odd that some of them had direct connections to Israeli intelligence. I also think it is odd that a lot of Arabs were in the moving business. I did business with these people in the late 1990’s, so I know a bit about it. I knew two former El Al air marshals, who wound up in the moving business. They were serious men back in Israel.

The fact is, Levantine politics is nothing but an endless riddle of conspiracy and intrigue that is inscrutable to occidentals. When America decided to annex this world into the empire, we imported all of the intrigue and conspiracy. The same shenanigans these people engage in over there, they started doing over here. That’s how they ended up in the US in low-barrier to entry businesses like moving companies. It was great cover, as they continued their Bronze Age game of cat and mouse with one another.

What we’re going to learn is that conspiracies and conspiracy theories are a necessary feature of multicultural societies. The Levant is the quintessential multicultural society, as it is the crossroads of the West and East. Three great religions and their off-shoots have their roots in the region. The fact that it a land of intrigue where no one ever takes anything at face value is a feature, not a bug. Creating that society in the West means creating a West that is tribal, distrustful and prone to believing outlandish conspiracies.

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Citationism

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One of the irritating things about reading anything that strives to be academic is the thicket of citations throughout the text. It’s not just the end notes and footnotes, but the constant references to the work of others. Often, the text reads like a summary of the work in the field, rather than something original. Just as often, the text has the feel of a paper turned in by a teenager, trying to prove they did their homework. It is not just bad writing, it is a waste of time. It is disrespectful of the reader.

It’s not just a stylistic thing, but a reflection of something that has happened in the intellectual classes of American society. It used to be that an intellectual mastered a subject in order to build on it. The point of his labor was not to prove he had read everyone in the field. The point was to find the gaps in his field and use the source material as a foundation for filling some of those gaps. In other words, the academic added to his field, rather than maintained it like a curator of a museum.

This shift from speculation to memorization reflects the shift in the culture, not just the education system. As a managerial system came to dominate the upper reaches of society, the education system became an exam system. You pass through the system in order to accumulate credentials that open doors within the managerial elite. The system began to select against people who question the current order. Instead, the system selects for those most likely to support and defend the system.

Of course, as the mass media moved from being a vocation to a profession, it began to adopt the habits seen in other areas of the managerial class. Commentary on current events is less about explaining what happened and more about the writer showing they memorized all the things that will be on the test. The opinion sections of news sites are echo chambers, where each writer salts their text with the latest fads, as if they are writing an essay for their high school social studies class.

The banality is not confined to Progressives. The so-called intellectual dark web is just as dull and cautious, but decorated with some risqué phrases picked up from dissident politics. Here’s a story from Claire Lehmann about the Australian election. She is sort-of from Australia, but the post reads like it was written by someone, who knows everything about the place from a text book. There are no insights or speculations, just a long proof that the writer has read all of the approved source material and passed the test.

She seems particularly proud of herself for using the term “champagne socialist” as if that is a catchy insight. It’s just a different ways of saying “limousine liberal” which was popular with conservatives in the 1980’s. Again, we see that strange echo. The New Left in the West is a weird museum exhibit on the 1970’s, while the New Right is nostalgia for the 1980’s. We have a generation of public intellectuals, who memorized the political fights of their parent’s generation, but have no idea what they meant.

The fetish for the citation also has crept into elite commentary.  In books about current events, writers fill the pages with references to other people’s ideas. Even in op-ed style pieces, there’s every effort made to name-drop and preen about having read some famous person in the field. Instead of trying to enlighten the reader, or even just inform, the modern writer is like the kid in the front of class, furiously waving her hand saying, “I know! I know!” Everyone is trying to show they did the required assignment.

When people stop looking for gaps in their own knowledge or in the prevailing orthodoxy, they no longer have much to say. The lack of curiosity used to be the end of an academic career. It was when the old guy was put out to pasture, gaining the “emeritus” label. Today, a promiscuous lack of curiosity is a requirement for anyone entering the media, the academy or the official public space. As a result, we have a class of academics and public intellectuals, who are a circus of banality.

Worse yet, and this gets back to the citation fetish, there is no effort to make existing ideas accessible. The other role of the intellectual is to explain complex things in a way that regular people can grasp. That’s both a public service and proof you have mastered the material. In an effort to prove to teacher that they have done their homework, modern writing is so junked up with citations, references and insider jargon, it is unreadable to anyone outside the field. Much of it is just unreadable.

Perhaps this is just another manifestation of the end phase of a society. Like an old man, who no longer has the energy or courage to question authority, a society gets old and loses its will to question. Instead of sitting around looking at scrap books and telling war stories, the intellectual class reboots old ideas from prior generations and repeats the same things over and over. It’s not that these people were trained wrong. It’s that they are the result of a culture with nothing left to say, so they just repeat their greatest hits.

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Privacy In The Technological State

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Privacy is something that has become a front burner topic for everyone, because every day we are treated to stories about how corporations are spying on us. They harvest information from our daily routines, put it into databases and then use it to push ads on us wherever we turn. They are now inserting surveillance devices in our homes to listen in on us as we go about our daily routines. Of course, no one knows how much is done with government blessing and cooperation, but we know it is there.

Of course, the fact that everyone is worried about this issue means the politicians never speak of it. The old Joe Sobran line was that America is a country where the political parties are significantly to the Left of their voters. Today, when Left and Right are meaningless artifacts from a bygone era, both parties simply make sure to never address the concerns of the people. While Democrats are analyzing spectral evidence for signs of Russian gremlins, the GOP is thanking you for not smoking.

Even though it seems that the unwanted gaze is upon us everywhere, we are just at the start of a new problem. In the pre-industrial age, the privacy concern was the king’s men rummaging through your possessions or intercepting your courier. For most people this was never going to be a concern. In the industrial age, the state expanded to the point where everyone could be exposed to a government process. The concern then was your rights within the process. How much did you have to reveal to them?

In the technological age, where the lines between the state and the global technology companies are blurred, we have very different problems. These are the sorts of problems classical liberals, so beloved by libertarians and conservatives, never contemplated. It’s why civic nationalism sounds so ridiculous when debating what to do about these tech firms controlling our civil discourse. For example, this blog is blocked by corporate firewall makers, which are private companies doing the bidding of the political class.

Think about this. Police departments are now using services like Ancestory.com to help solve cold cases. They submit DNA evidence to the service and the service reports back members who have some connection. You committed the perfect crime in 1982, but left behind some DNA at the crime scene. Your cousin decides to trace her (it’s always a her in these cases) ancestry using a DNA service. All of a sudden you have cops at your door asking you about your whereabouts 40 years ago.

It’s easy to shrug this off as the person suddenly tangled in this new technological surveillance web is a criminal. We all want to see justice done. But, think about the implications of this new world. All of us now have a permanent record that is increasingly open to examination by unofficial agents of the state. How long before some tech company gets into the business of solving crimes? How long before the cops start purchasing their services on-line just like they are doing with ancestry?

There is another side to this. The tech companies can also spy on the state, by accessing the records of people working in the state. Every government has to keep secrets in order to function. It is why every modern society has developed processes for determining what can be revealed and what can be concealed by government. There are processes the public and government must follow and they are administered by the courts. What happens when the tech giants can bypass all of this?

Think of another problem. Before the media was completely owned by the government, private media operations would publish government secrets they thought the public had a right to see. It sounds crazy, but it used to happen. The courts carved out exceptions to permit this, basically putting the burden of keeping secrets on the state. Now, with help from technology, the state can fight back and go after the handful of independent media people snooping around government. This story will be interesting.

There are two problems we face in the technological age that are new. One is how to place hard limits on the synopticon. This unwanted stare called the surveillance state that is now on all of us will have to be blinded, unless there are hard limits on where anyone can peer into the lives of the people. In other words, it is no longer about the state and the citizens’ right to privacy. It is about society and the human right to a private space, free of the unwanted gaze. We will need absolute zones of privacy.

The other problem is how to fashion punishments that are so terrifying that they change behavior. What’s happened within these massive technology firms is the evolution of a culture where everyone sees themselves as a member of a clerisy, guarding the public from themselves. These decisions to ban books and censor speech are not made at the top, but in the middle, by functionaries doing what they assume is their duty. Either the firms are destroyed and the people chased off or we change the culture in them.

One way to change the culture is to attach liability to violating the safe zones. The reason every company in America spends money proving they are not racist is there are serious liabilities that come with doing otherwise. Something similar must happen with privacy. Companies need to be as berserk about not looking where they are prohibited from looking, as they are about conforming to current morality on race. Otherwise, the solution is to let a million flowers bloom in Silicon Valley.

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