Biological Feudalism

Posted on July 31, 2019 by thezman

The nature of all human society is that there is an elite that sits atop the society, providing both order and structure to the whole. Because the apple does not fall far from the tree, elites tend to be inherited. The sons and daughters of the ruling class make up the next generation’s ruling class. In Guatemala, for example, a small number of families have controlled the country since the 16th century. Despite what the science deniers will tell you, biology is a real thing and it matters.

In the West, this biological reality has been tempered by an understanding that men of merit can be found in the lower ranks. Cultural pathways evolved for these men to earn their way into the elite. Originally this meant warfare. A great warrior and leader of men could earn his way into the elite. Some of the great aristocratic names of England, for example, were founded by the sword in The Hundred Years War. Later, intellectual and economic prowess became pathways to high status.

Now, in the Middle Ages, as Europe settled into a patchwork of ethnic groups, those pathways were shutoff for people outside the dominant ethnicity. Most obviously, Jews were blocked from holding high offices or ruling over Christians. In the late Roman Empire and into the early Middle Ages, these prohibitions did not exist, so there were very powerful Jews in what is now Italy, Spain and France. They often played a major role in the succession of kings and the naming of bishops.

What came to be the norm in Eurasia is that the ruling elite was biologically of the people over whom it ruled. In the case of conquered people, their elites operated like vassals, reporting to the elite that ruled over them. This is the naturally occurring nationalism that Yoram Hazony promotes for his people. Jews rule over Jewish lands and Jewish people for the good of the Jewish people. Those minority populations that happen to be in the way must sublimate themselves to the interests of Israel.

This is not the model everywhere. In most of the Middle East, a small minority will rule over the rest. The Alawites rule over the much larger tribes in Syria. In Iraq under Saddam Hussein, his tribe, al-Begat, ruled over the rest. His tribe was also of the much smaller Sunni sect. In fact, the history of the Middle East, going back to the classic period, is the story of small groups gaining control over large areas of diverse people, who outnumber their new rulers by significant margins.

South America is another model where the naturally occurring nationalism of Eurasia does not prevail. Throughout South America, the ruling class is very European in appearance and custom. They sit atop a large mixed race population that is often tribal, regional and multilingual. Look at the political elite of these countries and they are very white. In contrast, look at their populations and they resemble what the American Left imagines for Ohio one day. It’s biological feudalism.

This organizational system is why America is being overrun with migrants. In order for biological feudalism to work, the people at the top have to be able to feed and control the population. It’s why revolution has been a feature of South American politics since they broke free from Europe. One faction within the elite takes advantage of the other, by rallying some portion of the swarthy masses that are unhappy. Revolution is really just a family spat over control of the country.

It’s why everyone agrees Venezuela is a problem. There, the coalition of the swarthy actually took over country. You’ll note that in a group photo of South American leaders, Maduro is easy to spot. Granted, there’s a lot of oil and gas to be sucked out of the country by North America firms, but the reason the rest of South America has never embraced the Venezuelan leaders is they represent a threat to the biological feudalism that is the norm in South America.

In order to make biological feudalism work, the people at the top have to be homogeneous and they have to be ruthless. Settling political disputes within a narrow elite works when that narrow elite is what amounts to an extended family. This was what European feudalism relied upon to maintain order. If parts of the elite have loyalties that transcend that of the ruling elite, then fracture is inevitable. People will ruthlessly defend their own from outsiders. It is human nature.

That’s why this model is unlikely to work in America. The ruling elite is too diverse to operate like an extended family. Even in the Imperial Capital, where everyone knows everyone, outside loyalties loom large. At Yoram Hazony’s conference, many of the attendees see America as a resource center for their tribe’s war in the Levant. These are not people who will sacrifice for the good of America or the American elite. Their relationships in Washington are purely transactional.

That’s what you see happening with the Democrat Party. They want to be a coalition that is white presenting at the top, with maybe some token color, and the new coalition of the ascendant at the bottom. The trouble is, they seem to lack the willpower and ruthlessness to do it. They just purged leadership staff because they are too white. The tribes of the coalition don’t know their place and the only way they can know their place is if the ruling elite puts them in their place.

Most likely, the sort of system we will see in the post-national, majority-minority America is one ruled by narrow power centers. Silicon Valley will control the public space, but work with Wall Street, which controls the economy. The intelligence services, with their monopoly of force, will be another power center. These power centers will be controlled by a small number of clans. The farce of modern democracy will simply become a ritual that is managed by these power centers to their own advantage.

Whether or not this is possible is debatable. The dirty secret of South America is their organizational model was just an evolution of the colonial model, supported by North America and Europe. Pull away the support of the home culture and the natives most likely would have eaten their elites a long time ago. The South American system transplanted to North America, without external support, may just quickly devolve into chaos, warlordism and then old fashioned authoritarianism.

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The Gladiator

Posted on July 30, 2019 by thezman

In the movie Gladiator, Russell Crowe plays Maximus Decimus Meridius, a Roman general who is betrayed by the demented son of the Emperor. His downfall first leads to him in a slave camp and then as a gladiator in the provinces. His prowess as a fighter leads him to Rome to fight before the emperor, where he is revealed to be the famous general, in Rome to seek his revenge. The movie is a reworked version of the Count of Monte Cristo, but set in imperial Rome.

The subtext of the movie, is that the honor and integrity of the main character is what will eventually bring him home. Maximus is a loyal and honest man who serves Rome, without personal ambition. The bad guy, the Emperor’s son Commodus, is motivated by nothing but personal ambition and a deranged lust for his sister. Maximus fights and wins by the rules, even when the rules are rigged against him. Commodus lies, cheats and even kills his own father to get what he wants.

The juxtaposition, the honorable, rule-based hero, versus the ends justifies the means villain, is a common devise in American culture. When Hollywood made movies with traditional male leads, this was a common setup. Gladiator is probably the last movie featuring a normal male hero. Even though the hero dies in the end, he does so in a way that completes his arc and confirms that underlying assertion. In this case, the brave man died once while the coward died a thousand deaths.

All of this comes to mind when examining the political career of Kris Kobach. He is the champion of immigration patriots, now running for the Senate in Kansas. He had been rumored for jobs in the Trump White House, but Trump’s daughter feared he would be too effective and vetoed the idea. Instead, he has been left twisting in the wind by his own party and by the President he helped to elect. Like Maximus in the slave camp, Kris Kobach is without friends in high places.

Similarly, Kobach is determined to get back to the Imperial Capital, not to slay the emperor, but to be the voice of reason. His Senate run is considered a long shot, given that he lost the gubernatorial race in 2018. On the other hand, that was an off-year election and there was a lot of shenanigans in that race. His own party sabotaged his chances by running third-party candidates. With Trump at the top of the ticket, the winds may be more favorable for Kobach this time.

Of course, there is the chance his own party pulls some shenanigans this time, but with the Senate in the balance, maybe not. Then again, they were happy to throw the 2018 House elections in order to prevent Trump from getting anything done in his first term. Like the movie, Imperial America is thoroughly corrupt and no man can count on the honor of anyone in either party. If Kobach is make it back to the imperial capital, he will do so on the strength of his own virtue.

This belief that in the end, the virtuous will triumph over the villainous, the truth will prevail over falsehoods, is at the heart of civic nationalism. Despite all the evidence around us, the civic nationalist insists that if we get the right people in office, make the right arguments and pass the right laws, all the problems of democracy can be resolved. In order for that to happen, they insist that everyone assiduously play by the rules and support the democratic process.

In this regard, Kris Kobach may be the last true civic nationalist in politics. He is a genuine, issues based candidate that is playing by the rules in order to save that system of rules, not because it advantages him. In fact, the rules disadvantage him, but he is counting on the virtue of his fellow citizens to overcome that reality. His supporters are fighting with him, because they don’t want to give up on a system that has long ago given up on them. They still have hope.

Now, it is unlikely that his supporters will be chanting “Maximus” at Kobach rallies, although it would be great if they did. He is, like the character from the movie, the last champion for an old idea. Maximus was the old idea of Rome, while Kobach is that old idea that was America. While lots of people lament the passing of the old idea, only the champion is willing to fight for it. Like the character in the movie, Kobach’s end is most likely to have his corpse carried out of the arena by his supporters.

At the end of the movie, when they are carrying the hero’s body out of the arena, Commodus lies dead in the dust. The arc of both lives had reached their end. The hero would return to what he loved and to be with his family. The villain and what he represented gone for good. Presumably, what would come next for Rome was not the old Rome represented by Maximus or the Rome represented by Commodus. It would be something different, having gone through this ordeal.

Perhaps that is the best way to look at the Kobach campaign. Maybe he wins and maybe it begins the slow turn back to sanity that seems impossible. Maybe his campaign will ignite the revolt of Middle America. On the other hand, maybe it is the last chapter of the old way of doing things. Perhaps the result will be the final acceptance that what comes next is not a return to the past, but instead an overturning of the present in order to get to something new for our people.

A Future of Cults & Subcultures

Posted on July 29, 2019 by thezman

In modern usage, the word “cult” is entirely negative. It conjures the image of a strange religious group or maybe a charismatic madman claiming to be Jesus. In the former case, the group will have unusual beliefs, isolate themselves from the rest of society and maybe prepare for some prophesied event. Jim Jones or David Koresh are what comes to mind for most people in the latter case. Of course, there’s always the example of the suicide cult, which gave us the expression “pass the Kool-Aid.”

The word “cult” comes from the Latin word cultus, which meant the care owed to a deity, shrine or temple. In the ancient world, cults were common. They could be built around maintaining a particular shrine, which had been built for a deity, a great hero or even a legendary event. The people in the cult maintained the shrine and served the needs of pilgrims. The same was true of temples and even churches. In the ancient world, cults were just a normal part of everyday life.

This was true outside the Roman world, as well. For example, the Vikings did not have a word for what we would call religion. Instead, they had words to describe the public cult, to which everyone belonged, and words for the private cults that people maintained in their homes and villages. The public cult was what bound the people together with common rituals and celebrations, while the private cult was what held the family together. The concept of the household god, for example, was common.

This old idea of the cult is worth thinking about in the current age, as multiculturalism shatters traditional communities and the traditional customs of the people. Without something to organize people on the large scale, even a regional scale, something will inevitably organize them on the small scale. This was the traditional role of cults in the ancient world. They evolved locally to be local. Put another way, they were a local solution to a universal problem. They gave people purpose and meaning.

In modern America, as the shared national identity recedes, something will fill the void and most likely it will be something like the ancient concept of the cult. Of course, with the internet, local becomes a relative term. People of the same cult or subculture, can feel like they are close to one another, by participating is private on-line groups. These subcultures will become that which people primarily identify with in public. Another aspect of identity politics will be the many subcultures and cults that spring up.

Take for example the antisemitic community. It used to be that people who hated Jews were called anti-Semites. One could be an Episcopalian and be an anti-Semite. Not liking Jews was just one of many attributes to describe someone. Later, the term shifted to mean people who were hated by Jews. If Jews thought someone was a problem for the Jews, then they were described as an anti-Semite. The anti-Zionists, even the Jewish ones, are always called antisemitic, for example.

Today, some of that still holds, but antisemitism is much more complex now than just a dislike for Jews or Israel. Antisemitism is quickly becoming a unique and complex subculture with its own language, symbols and literature. Kevin McDonald was amusingly called the Karl Marx of antisemitism, but it is a good description. His three books on the Jews are now the foundation of a complex and sophisticated understanding of Jews and the people who have organized themselves around opposition to the Jews.

Of course, modern Judaism is evolving into cults as well. The Chabad movement, for example, has gone beyond being a weird orthodox subculture. It is now an international secret society with observation posts in every Western capital. They even have one of their guys in the White House. Zionism, as practiced by people like Ben Shapiro and Yoram Hazony, ticks all the boxes of a cult. Everything they touch is manipulated to fit into their worldview and the purpose of Zionism.

The subcultures evolving in regards to the Jews are just one type of cult that will probably be a feature of the coming age. Secular gurus like Jordan Peterson or Stephan Molyneux are going to become more common. It’s fair to say that both would have fit in well on the revival circuit back in the old days. Instead of healing people in tent revivals, they heal people on-line with therapeutic language. The multicultural future will be a new age of prophets and holy men, building communities around their teachings.

Now, America has never had a unifying culture. Regionalism and subcultures have been the defining feature of America since the founding. Civic nationalism, however, provided a universal framework within which all of these subcultures and regional identities could operate without generating social conflict. Much like the Vikings, America was a land with a public cult, civic nationalism and patriotism, and many private cults. You could be a southern redneck and a proud American at the same time.

That’s unlikely to be the future. For starters, the old system relied upon a primary loyalty to the national creed, even among the rich. That’s falling away, especially with the rich, who no longer have any loyalty to the people over whom they rule. Then there is the transparency of modern life. Mass communications means everyone can see how different everyone else is living, relative to their subculture. The Zionists and anti-Semites can follow one another in ways that were unimaginable decades ago.

The old line about familiarity breeding contempt will surely be true of the future. Because these evolving subcultures will know a lot about their competitors, they will evolve in opposition to them as well. You see this with what’s going on between the Zionists and the anti-Semites. They are growing in complexity, but also their animosity toward one another is becoming more complex. In the future, maintaining boundaries will be what matters, not finding ways to break down boundaries and cooperate.

Orange Versus Black

Posted on July 28, 2019 by thezman

Just when you thought it was safe, after the Mueller testimony was a colossal flop, President Trump finds a way to get everyone outraged all over again. His tweets about Congressman Elijah Cummings and his congressional district, have all the usual suspects pointing and sputtering. Given the amount of pointing and sputtering they have had to do the last three years, it is a miracle that they can even sputter. It should not be possible to be outraged for three years, but here we are.

Of course, the usual suspects are howling about the racism, as Cummings is black and his district is a black carve out. It includes some of the worst parts of Baltimore city, which means the mostly black parts. The district is about 30% white, which is why Cummings wins his elections with ease. In 2018 he won with 76% of the vote. If you are white and trapped in one of these districts, voting is pointless. In fact, voting for anyone is pointless as the results are known in advance.

As is custom with these types of districts, Cumming is as crooked as a ram’s horn. His wife runs a shady charity that gets millions from people with business in front the Congressman’s committee. He also seems to have some connection with the recent scandal that brought down the last mayor of Baltimore. In one of his tweets, Trump mentioned the corruption. It should be pretty easy to run a sting on Cummings, but he is off limits for the reason everyone knows, but does not say.

Of course, no one will bother disputing the facts of Trump’s tweets. That’s a dangerous subject that must never be mentioned. Any examination of Baltimore would not only reveal Trump is right, but also reveal those things we all know are true, but are told we must never mention. Baltimore is a black city and the highest crime areas are the blackest areas. For example, 92.9% of those arrested for murder are black and 91% of their victims are black. Crime in Baltimore is a black thing.

Of course, this is something everyone knows to be true. In fact, no one alive in modern America has ever lived in a time when people were puzzled about the nature of crime, with regards to race. The reason the urban hipsters exist is their hipster neighborhoods were ethnically cleansed of non-whites, mostly blacks. Giuliani cleaned up Manhattan by having the police put out the unwelcome mat for blacks. The stop and frisk policy was a success, because it relied on those assumptions about race and crime.

This link between race and crime is so well understood, efforts to conceal it have become a meme on social media. For example, when the news says they are looking for teens involved in a wilding incident, everyone knows what it means. Here’s one from Washington. The same thing is true for the party shootings, which always have a certain color to them. Here’s one from the current news. Shootings at block parties are like shootings at hip-hop concerts. Everyone knows what it means.

Of course, black crime is a young black male problem. When the Obama Administration tried to make the case that the cops are racists, they learned that the cops are probably not racist enough. In their report on crime, they found that young black males are 3% of the population and near 30% of homicides. Blacks were disproportionately represented as both homicide victims and offenders. The offending rate for blacks (34.4 per 100,000) was almost 8 times higher than the rate for whites (4.5 per 100,000).

The fact is, crime in Baltimore, like everywhere in America, is a black thing. The internent meme “1350” works because it is something everyone knows, even if they don’t know the exact details. Even when the issue is contained in certain sections of cities, people are made painfully aware of this reality, because crime in the hood does not stay in the hood. Every white person in America has a story in their family tree that involves leaving the old neighborhood because it went bad.

That brings us back to Trump. In sane world, his noticing the obvious should not be front page news, but we don’t live in a sane age. As the legendary quantitative blogger said long ago, “There are very few moments in a man’s existence when he experiences so much hostility, or meets with so little benevolence, as when he challenges fashionable perceptions of race.” Trump is about to face a fury of hostility from the usual suspects that no man has withstood in the past.

In fact, one of the usual suspects responsible for inflicting Barak Obama on the country is predicting that this is the Gettysburg of his presidency. From the perspective of the usual suspects, of course, Trump is Lee in this analogy. Like Charlottesville, this event will be the rallying cry for the Left until the election. Whatever other issues come up in the next year and a half, the 2020 election will be about race, specifically the old Progressive view of race versus one based in observable reality.

That is fundamentally the choice before us. Do we want to accept the Progressive view on the human condition, slowly sinking into the desperate, grinding poverty of a place like Baltimore? Or, we will not accept that and do what is required to prevent America from becoming a multicultural ghetto ruled by and parasitic elite? That’s what Baltimore is right now. It is a vision of tomorrow that no one should welcome. It does not have to be that way, but the only way to prevent it is to face it.

The Age Of Anti-Knowledge

Posted on July 27, 2019 by thezman

One of the funny things about this age is how the political poles seem to be swapping positions on a great many issues. The Right, for example, is now more concerned with the plight of the working man than the Left, while the Left is a fanatical defender of global capitalism. If 1980 man were transported to the present, he could be forgiven for thinking Tucker Carlson is a liberal. He uses the kind of language that was common on the Left in response to the rise of conservatism.

That does not mean Tucker is a liberal. It just means what we understand to be Left and Right are not fixed, timeless positions. They are just words used for “us” and “them” in the game of politics. Conservatism, properly understood, was always skeptical of capitalism, because it tended to destroy indiscriminately. Bulldozing a church to build a processing center may be a more efficient use of resources, but conservatives always knew the altar was the keystone of civilization, not the factory.

As is always the case, the Left has the ability to create and define its opponents, because it controls the institutions. Forty years ago it created the image of a conservative as a ruthless, cold-hearted capitalist, in order to have an enemy they could more easily manipulate. They never cared about the poor or the working classes and never opposed rule by corporation. The Left in America is an effort to explain why inequality prevails despite the fact man is born equal.

Thinking of the American Left, at least the old Protestant aspects of it, as a theodicy, is a good way to understand why the people who used to sport Darwin fish on their Volvo are now extreme science deniers. Steve Sailer has been following the new star on the denialist scene, Angela Saini, who is getting famous waging jihad against observable reality. Her latest fatwa has been published on the site called Nature, which is ironic, given the article is a rebuke of nature.

Saini is not the only primitive showing up in the prestige press, shaking her staff at the heavens, demanding the gods conform to her dictates. Cordelia Fine was the toast of the town a couple years ago, when she published a book claiming reality is a magic trick played on us by hobgoblins. She did not put it that way. Her case was actually much weaker and less coherent. Greg Cochran’s review of her book reads like someone correcting a child or possibly a simpleton.

Of course, the over-the-top science denialism we see in the prestige press is filtering down to the rest of the cult. They don’t bother with the arguments, instead preferring to repeat the catch phrases. The extremely long-winded YouTuber, Alt-Hype, reviewed a chubby left-wing incel, who is making a name for himself as a science denier. JF Gariepy has a shorter version. The even shorter version is the lefty incels are now denying the very basics of biology.

If you are over the age of forty, this is quite a development. Within living memory, to be a Progressive meant mocking religious people of all types, but especially Evangelicals, as science denying primitives. The Left waved around evolution like a magic talisman, dismissing any argument they deemed religious, by which they meant cultural. Even Obama mocked Christians this way when he was running in 2008. Progressives bleeping loved science, while their enemies loved magic.

The change in tone and language among some right-wingers, like Tucker Carlson, is a bit jarring, but once you get past the superficial, it makes sense. In the 1980’s, a right-wing regard for the public good would not have focused on things like affordable family formation or wage stagnation in the heartland. The excesses of cosmopolitan globalism would not have entered their minds, because those things did not exist. It took time and hard experience to learn that Pat Buchanan was right after all.

What’s happening with the Left seems to be different. It is not an adjustment to new information or a changing culture. For a very long time, the human sciences understood that the variety we see in the human family is rooted in nature. Even those who dispute the validity of evolutionary biology on religious grounds, fully acknowledged that God does not distribute his gifts equally. The Left argued that these difference could be mitigated through public policy and cultural change.

That’s no longer the case. What the Left is engaged in now is a full-throated rejection of observable reality on moral grounds. Angela Saini commands that you accept that Kenyan performance in distance running is an optical illusion. Cordelia Fine, says, as a women, she knows sex is a social construct, created by men. This is not an inability to grasp the material. It is a conscious desire to forbid certain knowledge, to anathematize noticing the world and the explanations for what we see.

It is popular to talk about this phenomenon in terms of Galileo. The left-wing science deniers are playing the antagonist role of the Church and the humans sciences are in the protagonist role. This is probably comforting to the empirically minded, as it suggests they will eventually triumph in the end. Not only is this a faulty reading of history, particularly the Church, it assumes that human progress is inevitable. That no matter what they do, the march of science will continue unabated.

Instead, what we are seeing could be the signal of a coming dark age. Maybe this is what it was like in 1177 BC. The slow decline in general intelligence leads to a period of anti-knowledge, where knowing how stuff works, or even being curious about it, is seen as a threat to the established order. The brakes are applied and progress is reversed until the point where the people are no longer able to operate the mechanisms of society created by their ancestors.

A Summer World Tour

Posted on July 26, 2019 by thezman

The custom in the independent media game is to do something to recognize milestones like anniversaries or certain show numbers. July not only marked the two year anniversary of this show, but gave us the 100th episode as well. I did not acknowledge the anniversary, as it fell on the holiday break. I also forgot all about it until I was putting this post together and looked it up. As far as this milestone, I could not think of anything special to do, so I just stuck with the normal program.

Showing up is the big challenge for this sort of venture. Most podcasters and vloggers start strong, but after a few months start missing shows, posting late and eventually quit before their first year. The same is true of bloggers. In some cases the grind of sticking to a schedule is the issue, but for others it is simply that they run out of material. They also get disappointed by not becoming a star right away. Once the novelty wears off, they start to lose interest and eventually quit doing it.

That’s the trick though. When I started the blog, I had no idea what I wanted to do with it, so I tried a bunch of different things and kept at it until I found a style and process that I enjoyed. That took about a year. Then I noticed the audience starting to tick up ever so slowly. I think it was late in year two that some people with big followings noticed me and started linking my posts. That brought lots of traffic and the site grew like a weed ever since. Showing up eventually pays off.

The same pattern has emerged with the podcast. I had done some interviews and people suggested I try doing a podcast. I had no idea how it worked or what I would do, so I just started doing stuff and figuring it out. Two years in and I’m still trying new stuff to both mix things up and to figure out what works for me. Episode one had a grand total of 300 listens. Now a show gets thousands of listens the first day. I have no way of knowing how many people listen via Google and Apple.

The point here, is if you are planning to do a blog, create a YouTube channel or some other type of on-line activity, sticking with it is the main challenge. Eventually you figure out what works for you and in the process you build an audience. That audience will tell you what works and what does not work. Eventually, the process becomes natural and something you enjoy doing every day, even on the bad days. For me, writing and podcasting is a shelter from the storm.

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: Trouble In Persia (Link) (Link)
12:00: Those Greeks, Again (Link) (Link)
22:00: Good News From The Fatherland (Link) (Link)
32:00: Boris The Lucky (Link) (Link)
42:00: Dutch Clan Activity (Link)
47:00: Lagos On The Cape (Link)
52:00: African Imports (Link)
57:00: Closing

Direct Download, The iTunes, Google Play, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed, Bitchute

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

https://youtu.be/-Z4S1Z9FTMs

A Day At The Theater

Posted on July 25, 2019 by thezman

Politics in a modern democracy is mostly theater. The various actors hired by the wealthy, put on shows for the people. Today, we have entire television outlets dedicated to staging these performances. Sometimes the performances are intended to sway public opinion on an issue. Sometimes they are intended to distract the public from something important. The Russian collusion hoax was intended to be a distraction, so the public would not think about the FBI corruption.

The difference between Hollywood and political theater is a different measure of the return on investment. Hollywood can make a crappy movie that goes straight to video, but still make money, as long as the cost was low. Killer Klowns from Outer Space can be a success, even though it is a ridiculously bad movie, because it was cheap and has become a cult favorite. Hank Johnson worrying about Guam flipping over really does not work the same way.

Political theater is all about keeping one faction of the public engaged in the political process, ideally at the expense of another faction. The Left gives some character on the Right a rough time, so the public is either exhilarated for their side, the Democrats in this case, or angry at their side, the Republicans. That’s a success for both teams of actors, as their handlers get the engagement they seek from the public. The public is focused on the theater, rather than the laws being passed.

As much as pundits mock the political theater, the people staging these events are pretty good at their job. Mass media has provided them with tools to engage even the most disinterested of the public. Fifty years ago, most people paid little attention to politics or political theater. A century ago, about 15% of adults bothered to vote in presidential elections. Today, half of all adults vote in presidential elections and about 65% of eligible voters turned out in the last presidential election.

That’s what makes the Mueller hearings a puzzler. Five minutes watching Mueller made clear that he is an old man who has lost a step. He was never a brilliant guy to begin with, but he could play his role as the horse-face Brahman. Today, he has the horse face, but not much else. His fumbling around with friendly questions from the Democrats was hard to watch. Anyone who has had to deal with a family member making the long slow walk into the sunset knows the feeling.

These events are not just a last minute staging. The Democrats have been working for months to put this show together. Staffers would have spent weeks preparing questions, preparing Mueller for those questions and making sure he knew the answers he was expected to give. The point of these shows is to provide soundbites for state-run media to use in the following propaganda broadcast. In fact, the cable channels get a heads up on those soundbites in advance.

Yet none of that happened. Instead, poor old horse face was left to look like a guy who had wondered off from the home. Instead of clips of him repeating the scripted catch phrases, it was clips of him fumbling about looking confused. It would take a heart of stone to not feel some anger at the people who put that old man through that ridiculous hearing in front of Congress. Lefty media was so caught off-guard, they were forced to concede the obvious and call it a debacle.

Now, maybe that was the point. The Russian collusion hoax has become a problem for the political class, because the people still peddling it make Mike Cernovich seem like a sober minded skeptic. Maybe this show was not really for public consumption, so much as a way to embarrass the people peddling the Russian conspiracy theory and the impeachment nonsense. If so, they forgot to let the presidential candidates know, as they were out demanding impeachment the same day.

Just as Hollywood makes expensive flops and Broadway has shows that close after a month, the political class has their flops too. McDonald’s, the most successful fast food operation on earth, once tried selling a burger you had to assemble yourself. The Arch Deluxe is considered one of the great product flops in history. Hollywood, of course, has made a lot of box-office bombs that lost tens of millions for the backers. Maybe that’s what we saw with this hearing. It was the Gigli of politics.

That said, political disasters tend to have downstream consequences that you don’t see in the theater or in Hollywood. In the entertainment realm, they just accept the occasional disaster as a cost of doing business. In politics, these disasters tend to shift the political dynamic by discrediting one side. In this case, the Democrats may have disqualified themselves as reliable critics of Trump, just as Bill Kristol and the neocons did to themselves back in the 2016 election.

With an election coming up, simply being against Trump more than the other guy is not going to be a winning strategy. If you look at the Democrat race thus far, it is has been a contest to see who can be the most creative at hating white people and who can be the most enthusiastic in hating orange man. After the Mueller hearing, the field may be left with just hating white people. Poor old creepy Uncle Joe could be in for a very rough time of it at the next debate with the brown horde.

Theater, especially political theater, relies heavily on symbolism. The sad image of Bob Mueller, a caricature of WASP America, fumbling about for answers, was a powerful image for the ascendant. They did not see a failed performance. For them, they saw the door opening for their opportunity to take the stage. The only thing missing from that show was a chorus lead by Ocasio-Cortez, singing Tomorrow Belongs To Me. In that regard, the show was not a total bust.

Alienation And Its Discontents

Posted on July 24, 2019 by thezman

If you were to transport into this age, someone from a prior age, say the 19th century, that person would certainly be amazed at what he saw. From the perspective of this age, the assumption is he would be most impressed with the technological advances relative to his time. The ability to easily communicate with people, from all over the globe, would probably be the most dazzling. Instead of waiting weeks for a letter from a friend, we exchange e-mails and texts instantly from wherever we happen to be standing.

People in the modern West tend to think of progress in purely material terms, so that would be the thing most people think of in this thought experiment. Our communication systems are better. Our transportation systems are better. Our food and entertainments are vastly more plentiful, if not necessarily better. It’s not unreasonable to think that 19th century man would marvel at a fast food drive through. To him, at least in a material sense, this age is beyond the world of fantasy.

Something else would probably stun 19th century man. That is the lack of human interaction compared to his time. This is one of those counter-intuitive things for people in this age, because this age is awash in communications. Everywhere you turn, the rulers are sending messages to you about the latest products you must consume or the most recently approved thoughts you should promote. Humans in this age are awash in mass media, which bombards us wherever we go.

When you look past that top layer, however, what you see is people “interfacing” with one another, but very few people bonding and interacting. Look at the typical customer service experience. You call and someone, from somewhere, responds to your prompts, using a script provided to them by the software in the call center. Increasingly, the customer service agent is a robot. Most people order their prescriptions, for example, from a robot, not a pharmacist. It is purely transactional.

This sterilization of human interaction is not limited to the impersonal contact we make with global corporations. Inside the corporation, relationships are increasingly automated and systematized. Managers are trained to use management systems to interface with their direct reports. Staff is no longer encouraged to be loyal to a manager, as that is as sensible as being loyal to the coffee machine. The manager is just an entity that inputs data into the management system.

The argument in favor of automation in the work place is it reduces errors and lowers costs, but often the driving force is to limit human interaction. The shift supervisor, so used to dealing with systems in his life, is unequipped to actually manage human beings on a personal level. Instead of monitoring their work and correcting their errors, adjusting for personality, he posts their efficiency reports in the break room, along with all of the other management metrics that come from the quality control system.

This is something people in the process management world have come to understand about the modern workplace. It’s not as much about efficiency as about the fact that young people no longer possess the social skills that were an assumed part of society just a couple of generations ago. The young manager does not have the social skills to confront an underling over an error or the intuition to encourage someone who needs a little motivation to get through a difficulty.

The general reputation of millennials in the work place is that they are self-absorbed, needy and entitled. Companies have responded to this with tighter structures that remove the need for initiative and adaptability. In reality, the cause of the problem is a generation of people raised by robots. The well-adapted millennials are those who played sports or served in the military. In those environments, stripped of automation, they learned how to be leaders, teammates and adapt to new conditions.

This is not just a workplace phenomenon. This post from the London School of Economics is amusing in many ways, but one line jumps out. “Occupational segregation matters because it can lead to inequality between workers and limit the talent pool for employers trying to fill a position.” The sterility of language will remind anyone over the age of 40 of the jokes made about communism. That’s a line that would seem at home in a provincial report on the latest five year plan.

This is something you see all over the social sciences. It’s why the author of the post claims, with a straight face, that economists are baffled as to why homosexuals are clustered into certain fields. Within living memory, people just knew why this was and did not think much about it. It was so obvious, it was assumed everyone knew it. In the atomized transactional world of today, humans are the most baffling thing to their fellow humans. No one knows anything about themselves now.

Part of this is the result of multiculturalism. That man brought here from a century ago would have been snatched from a world in which everyone was like him. If he was a city dweller, he may have bumped up against other tribes of immigrants or natives, but his daily life was spent around his people. What he knew about those other people was through the lens of his understanding of himself and his people. It was not through a description in a textbook or from a class on human development.

Today we live in a world of strangers. White communities have been shattered, along with the sense of community. In fact, whites are no longer permitted to have a sense of community. Since most of what makes the modern world possible is still run by whites, the result is a world run by deracinated strangers in a sea of alienation. Those management systems are simply a response to this reality. It’s a solution to slow what is the inexorable process of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism.

There’s also the fact that technology has not just made stuff cheaper. It has changed how humans interact with the world. This shows up in standardized testing. Young people are better at taking tests, because they live in a world of tests. Their games are structured along the same lines as a standardized test. Instead of a free form world of play, it is the range of options available in the video game. Instead of problem solving, it is leaning the combination of available inputs.

This transactional existence is not without its consequences. The alienation that is a daily part of modern life manifests as nostalgia throughout the culture. Hollywood movies are either based on childhood items, like super heroes, or remakes of shows from when America was not this way. The rising tide of populism and ethno-nationalism, particularly among the youth, is a romantic response to a modern world that offers plenty of ways to use your time, but no answer for how to live.

That’s what would most shock and horrify 19th century man about this age. He could live without the instant communications, but he could not live a life in which no one had anything to say or a reason to say it. He could live without modern transportation, but he could not live without a place to a go or a people to visit. He could not live alone in a world full of strangers. It’s all those close, smelly, sweaty connections with your people that makes you human. He could not live without that and in a probability, neither can we.

We Need A New Elite

Posted on July 23, 2019 by thezman

Probably the worst thing Buckley conservatives did to their middle-class white supporters is instill in them an unconditional love of rich people. Conservatism accomplished very little, but one thing it did amazingly well is hypnotize middle-class whites into instinctively and ferociously defending the rights and privileges of the rich and powerful. Even today, the most racially aware white still gets a little angry when they hear an Ocasio-Cortez or Liz Warren rail against the rich.

This conditioning, of course, was deliberate. The super-rich donors that made Buckley conservatism possible saw the movement as a vehicle to protect their interests from the Left during the Cold War. It’s not that the American Left was ever a real threat to the rich and powerful, as most of them came from rich and powerful families. Progressivism has always been a rich man’s religion in America. It’s that the Left put a lot of conditions on the rich, something we see today with the Left-Corporate alliance.

With Buckley conservatism, the middle-class could be turned into an army of defenders that put no conditions on the rich. By the 1980’s, the anti-communism of Buckley conservatism was turning into the worship of rich people. The movie Wall Street or the popular TV show Family Ties are good examples. There you have heroic figures, who are pure materialists, with no sense of duty to their fellow man. Getting rich, by any means necessary, was a social good in itself.

This conception of conservatism is thoroughly at odds with any past conceptions of conservatism. In fact, there was never anything conservative about Buckley conservatism. From Joseph de Maistre to Russel Kirk, conservatism accepted that every society has a ruling elite. In order for a society to function, that elite must be explicit and indebted to the welfare of the society over which they rule. Conservatism always started with an understanding of duties and obligations.

Whatever Buckley may have said or written in his younger days, by the time the conservative movement reached it maturity, it was something that would have been unrecognizable to a historic conservative. It was a celebration of materialism and individualism that placed no obligations on the elite. Instead, it divorced the rich and powerful from their duties, turning their indifference into a virtue. That virtue has now curdled into a contempt not seen since the French Revolution.

To this day, the few intellectual hobos shuffling around the ruins of Buckley conservatism still try to peddle this lie. They wave around the Medusa head, painted up as Ocasio-Cortez, in an effort to scare their dwindling ranks into thinking socialism is their great enemy. That only a suicidal defense of those terribly vulnerable billionaires will prevent the Left from raising their taxes. It is a revolting display of toadyism that makes a decent man ball his fist and have dark thoughts.

Much of what ails the American Empire today is rooted in this terrible trick played upon the white middle-class of America. Once the Cold War ended, vast resources used to fight the communists could have been turned toward addressing long ignored problems in the homeland. Instead, the white middle-class went on a long orgy of pointless consumption, while a new class of super-rich oligarchs rose up, unconstrained by any obligation to the society that spawned them.

The truth is, if America had better rich people, rich people who felt a sense of duty to their fellow citizens, there would be no dissident right. Even putting aside race realism, if the rich just embraced an immigration and economic policy that was explicitly good for Americans, there would be no Donald Trump. The political center of America would be to the Right of the current GOP. The debates would be about how best to manage trade with the world and how best to guard the border.

Instead, we have political parties that despise their own voters, financed by billionaires, who despise the American people. Of course, this culture of contempt is not just an American phenomenon. It has spread throughout the empire, infecting the rich and powerful of the West. This story about the billionaires of France reneging on their commitment to rebuild Notre Dame is a perfect example. These people carry on like spoiled brats, living in the moment, indifferent to everyone.

In a business, bankruptcy is when the current arrangements are no longer sustainable, so the enterprise is either liquidated or reconstructed. That requires terminating current management, either to be replaced with better people, who will bring the firm back to solvency or so the firm can be dissolved. In a nation, revolution is similar, in that current elites need to be eliminated so a new set of elites can retool the country and bring it back to health. Bankruptcy and revolution are about new beginnings.

That’s where things are in the West, but America in particular. The current elites are rotten to the core. They are irredeemable. There’s no talking them out of their corruption or appealing to their humanity, at least not until they are on the gallows. These are people who now define themselves in opposition to that which makes nations possible and makes a people possible. For the people of the West to regain their sense of self, to make countries into homelands again, it means replacing the current elites.

The people can not be all, & always, well informed. the part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. if they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. we have had 13. states independant 11. years. there has been one rebellion. that comes to one rebellion in a century & a half for each state. what country before ever existed a century & half without a rebellion? & what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? let them take arms. the remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. what signify a few lives lost in a century or two? the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. it is it’s natural manure.

–Thomas Jefferson, Paris 1787

What Comes Next

Posted on July 22, 2019 by thezman

There was a disturbing report the other day from Pew Research which claimed that 91% of Democrats think political violence is what comes next. In the same study, 61% of Republicans said violence is inevitable. The poll was done in the context of Trump spat with the foreign women in Congress. There’s no break down by race, sex or age, just party self-identification. Usually, the lack of demographic data invalidates a poll, but people willing to self-ID as either party these days are going to be easy to generalize.

The report is disturbing, because of the well-established pattern of the Left signaling what they are going to do, by warning that they fear it. For example, in the Bush years, they regularly told us they feared the government would use these new powers to spy on Americans and subvert the political process. As soon as they had the chance, the Obama administration began widespread abuse of the government surveillance powers and tried to subvert the 2016 election.

Of course, the game the Left has always played is to use violence as a pretext to impose their preferred policies. We’ve had waves of left-wing violence since the Obama administration, all intended to elicit a response. Those responses are used to justify what amounts to political terrorism. The toppling of statues and the ruination of people, who hold unpopular opinions, was all justified by one or two incidents. Charlottesville is still used to justify anti-white pogroms by the Left.

Given past patterns and the trajectory of the country both ideologically and demographically, what comes next is important to consider. Most insiders assume Trump loses the 2020 election to whoever the Democrats pick. Last time they could muster a few million illegal votes in key states. This time it will be more than ten million, as they have been working the problem for four years. The tech oligopoly has been hard at work to make sure there will not be a repeat of 2016.

There’s also a good chance the Republicans lose the Senate. Even if they hang on, the senate GOP is so easily bullied, they will offer no resistance to the Left. After 2020, the Left will have complete control of the federal government. More important, given the demographics, they will be the dominant party for as long it matters. The future will be one in which people like Ilhan Omar and Ocasio-Cortez gloat about their ascendancy, while championing anti-white policies. The future will be vibrant, but not bright.

In order for such a world to stagger on, expect the tech giants to ramp up their censorship operations using anticipatory censorship. They are tinkering with this now on platforms used by children and stupid people. Instagram is now preventing users from posting things that they prohibit. Instead of the user posting it then having the post taken down after complaints, the system censors the post as they submit. You can expect this technology to become widespread, even in e-mail.

Dissidents tend to respond to this stuff by arguing that there are ways around it and alternative platforms will inevitably spring up in response. That’s not really what they are doing with this type of censorship. It’s about nudging the frame. Even if in the narrow area of social media, people get used to self-censoring, anticipating what happens with this technology, that habit will carry over into their daily life. This is something the tech giants have learned from their Chinese communist engineers.

Of course, semi-permanent control by the Democrats will usher in the demographic collapse that immigration patriots have been warning about for decades. Record numbers are crossing the border every day now and that is with a political atmosphere not welcoming of migrants. Just imagine what happens when President Harris gives a speech inviting half of the world to come to America for free health care. The rush to the border will be unprecedented.

That’s the thing to keep in mind when contemplating what comes next. The pattern thus far has been that the future comes faster than expected. In the 2000’s, people warned that homosexual marriage would have all sorts of negative consequences. In a little more than a decade, parents are being forced to take their children to drag queen story time at the local library. In a flash, we went from “let them get married” to little boys doing drag shows at gay clubs. Cultural collapse tends to accelerate.

That really is how to think about what comes next. When you are in the avalanche, every minute feels like a lifetime. In the crisis, time slows, but in reality everything moves quickly. Two decades ago, immigration patriots warned that America would lose its white majority by 2050 at the earliest. In all probability, it will happen by the middle of the next decade. Today, dissidents are warning about the coming left-wing authoritarianism, as if it is far in the distance, when it is right around the corner.

There are two types of coping strategies that will emerge. One is to over-estimate the awfulness of what comes next. People insulate themselves with hopelessness in order to avoid facing reality. The flip side of this is to dismiss the warnings about what’s coming, a sort of whistling past the graveyard. Even today people still say that the radicalism of the Left will destroy itself. You see this with the “go woke go broke” chants that fly in the face of reality. No woke corporation has suffered in the slightest.

The proper response, what must come next for those on this side of the great divide, is to accept the reality of the situation and act accordingly. That means getting involved in social activities that allow you to recruit, building social networks of likeminded people and working to always be the reasonable voice in the room. The vibrant future may look like a dark age, but the future is not written. Even in the depths of the dark ages, communities thrived, even prospered, and people lived good lives.

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Monthly Archives: July 2019