The Guns Of Resistance

Posted on January 20, 2020 by thezman

Today is the big pro-gun rally in Richmond Virginia. The rally is in response to the gun grabbing proposals by the newly ascendant Democrat party in the state. For the first time in a long time, Democrats gained control of all three branches of government in the last election and immediately set about implementing their fantasy agenda. Their first order of business was a series of vindictive, retributive proposals aimed at the normal population of the state, starting with guns and gun owners.

What’s going on in Virginia is a glimpse of what is coming for the country as a whole as we descend into the multicultural paradise. Virginia was a solidly normal state over the last seventy years. The politics were usually uneventful. Most issues were controlled at the local level. The state government was limited and usually run by the sorts of people, who thought that was a good thing. Once in a while a colorful governor would get his name in the paper, but otherwise politics was sober minded.

Decades of immigration have done to Virginia what it did to California, with the addition of massive Federal growth in Northern Virginia. Manufacturing and agricultural concerns have championed the importation of millions from Central America. Government has imported people from all over the country into Northern Virginia. The result has been the same sort of political shift we saw in California. The sprawling urban areas control state politics, which means the Left controls politics.

Like California, the normal population of the state did not think much about the massive influx of non-white immigrants. No one thought about the long-term impact of a million or so left-wing suburbanites from liberal strongholds moving into Washington suburbs for their government jobs. Anyone who mentioned it was hooted off the stage, if they were even allowed on the stage in the first place. It is only now that the link between demographics and politics is becoming obvious.

This dynamic where the newly arrived take over state politics will be something we see all over the South and Southwest in the coming decades. While whites will remain the majority in some cases or the largest minority in others, white solidarity remains forbidden, both practically and spiritually. As a result, the usual suspects will divide the white vote making whites the least powerful group in these states, even as the newly ascendant non-whites pass explicitly anti-white legislation.

You see some of that with the Virginia rally. The organizers are more concerned with looking good for the far-Left media covering the event. They have been telling participants to not bring things like Confederate flags to the rally. The 2A people still think abiding by liberal morality is paramount. Inevitably, the FBI will have some of their crisis actors at the event, so the media can get photos and video. The organizers will then invest their time apologizing for it.

This is a great example of the challenge dissidents face in dealing with the mass of white people in America. On the one hand, the civic nationalists make optics more important than the message. The racists and old school race-realists look at these events as a chance to reinforce the walls of their ghetto. They show up in their silly outfits waving flags in order to offend, rather than persuade. Both sides are simply acting out their Progressive conditioning.

That’s what makes effective activism difficult. These gun proposals by the Democrats are clearly aimed at spiting white people. There’s no practical point to these laws, other than to stick a finger in the eye of the sorts of people who don’t support the Left. The attacks on AR-15 ownership, for example, are about sticking it to white people, who are the people who own these sorts of sporting guns. That should be the salient point, but the emotional conditioning of whites makes that difficult.

You’ll note that there is no longer any discussion of crime on the Left with regards to gun grabbing. Even they have accepted the fact that gun crime is largely a black problem and now a Hispanic problem. Blacks and Hispanics shoot one another with handguns, not expensive sporting rifles. Despite this, the victims of these gun grabbing proposal would rather gnaw off their own arms than admit it. Generations of conditioning in anti-racism have had their desired effect.

Make no mistake about the intent. The newly formed ruling class of the multicultural South and Southwest will first disarm the white population. They don’t care about blacks and Hispanics shooting one another. They do hate white people. That’s why Virginia wants to forbid the private transfer of firearms. That’s the obnoxiously dishonest “gun show loophole” nonsense. It is the precursor to licensing and then confiscation. When every gun is accounted for, they can easily be confiscated.

Another thing you see in Virginia that will apply to the country at large is the stubborn refusal to accept reality. The people organizing resistance to these gun grabbing proposals still think America is a rule-based society. They think if they carefully abide by the rules and mobilize their supporters, they can win the political game. There’s that old civic nationalist blind-spot regarding their enemies. They think they can reason with the other side. The other side will be unmoved by all of this.

Another important angle to this is the silence from Conservative Inc. over what is happening in Virginia. Site like National Review and the Federalist have not talked about it much at all. That’s because Conservative Inc. is staffed by the urbanite bugmen that staff Progressive operations. They think guns are scary, so the issue is not relevant to their project. They are more concerned about getting Twitter followers. It’s another reminder of which side they will ultimately support.

In the end, the Virginia Democrats will pass what they like and most people will go along with it. The value to this side of the great divide is in opening up the 2A issue as another entry point to dissident politics. What’s going in Virginia would not happen in a homogeneous stable society. It is the inevitable result of cosmopolitan globalism and multiculturalism. White people don’t fear white people owning guns. It’s the people ruing over white people, who fear white people owning guns.

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Talking To Normie

Posted on January 17, 2020 by thezman

Continuing my experimental phase, the show this week is about ways to talk to our normie friends and family, in a way that leads them our way. I’ve been around civic nationalists recently and I was reminded of conversations I’ve had with others about how tough it is sometimes for dissidents to address the civic nationalist arguments in a way that brings them our way. This week I thought a show on how to talk to normie in a positive way would be interesting.

I was not sure how I wanted to structure it, so I took some of the things that have come up recently in my normie interactions and made those segment topics. Then I just turned the mic on and started talking about each one, as if I was giving a short lecture to a classroom full of civic nationalist. I was thinking of it like a class on dissident politics for freshmen level students. I wanted it to be accessible to the sorts of people who don’t spend any time on this side of the great divide.

The key thing with talking to our normie friends, family and acquaintances is to not become adversarial. The huge blunder our side makes on social media is to mock these people as if they are enemies. A little bit of that is fine, but fifty people blasting a civic nationalist on Twitter is not winning him over. It’s only hardening his position and making it easier for the gatekeepers to keep him inside. These people are future allies and compatriots, not forever enemies of the cause.

Effective organizing is building lots of on-ramps to this side of the great divide, to make it easier for all sorts of people to come this way. Language that will work on the 2A civic nationalist will not necessarily work on the spergy libertarian. The Sean Hannity watching patriot is going to respond to different rhetoric than the Tucker watching Donald Trump supporter. Dissident politics needs to be like a department store, with something for all the types of white people out there.

This inability to build on ramps is why prior race realists have always failed to gain any traction. They struck people as lunatics. They had one on ramp. You had to pay the lunatic a toll in order to cross over. The now defunct alt-right suffered from the same defect, as it became loaded down with insider jargon and factionalism. All the ways into it were narrow and went passed people that most people would find odd. It’s why they could never break out of their subculture.

It is the heart of the optics debate. If dissident ideas are to gain traction with typical white people, it has to creep up on them like the fog. One day, they just find themselves on this side of the divide, without realizing they made the journey. That happens by having lots of ways here and lots of pleasant sounding people they can trust, subtly pointing them in this direction. That can only work if there are lots of doors through which they can pass into this type of politics.

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
05:00: Hate Speech
15:00: Public – Private Tyranny
25:00: Who Owns You?
35:00: Peaceful Separation
45:00: The Value Of Citizenship

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

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

https://youtu.be/ruoZS1jvkgQ

The UFO Problem

Posted on January 16, 2020 by thezman

Tucker Carlson has a UFO problem. Going back to the start of his Fox show, he has done segments on various claims about space aliens visiting earth. These are not claims by people, who swear they have been probed by big gray men, but the claims of people who worked in government at one time or another. He has even interviewed people, who worked on government UFO programs. Recently he had former Pentagon people on to talk about this story of a secret UFO file.

People like these sorts of stories, even if they don’t believe in little green men secretly visiting our planet. It’s fun to think about what it would be like if we did verify such visitations from another world. Tucker is not a kook, so his interest in this topic should not be dismissed out of hand. The American government has taken the issue seriously, at least according to that recent story. So much so they have had top men working on it for a very long time. They think it could be true.

The crux of the matter is that pilots have, on multiple occasions, recorded objects buzzing around in ways that cannot be explained. At least they look like objects in the videos released to the public. In these videos, pilots and crew can be heard asking questions about what they are seeing. No official explanation has been offered, so we are left to assume they don’t know either. It seems that on many occasions, American fighter pilots have spotted UFO’s.

Now, it has to be said that many of these could simply be clever pranks by servicemen with too much free time. Every year someone gets busted for making a contrail penis in the sky, so these guys like pranks. Others could simply be anomalies that have a boring technical explanation, so no one bothers with them. Maybe this is just another part of how the government keeps people distracted. The secret UFO files are just part of the ongoing psyops to distract the public from noticing too much.

The trouble with the various ways of dismissing the UFO stuff is it often sounds as conspiratorial as the theories explaining why these are visiting aliens. Repeatedly, we see that the people running the American government are too dumb to execute the basic functions of the state. It’s unlikely they are working a complex, multi-generational deception involving fake UFO video. The people who use text messages to plot sedition are not going to be working such a complicated scheme.

What the facts tell us about this stuff is the American government has recorded lots of these events and they remain unexplained. There is a good chance other militarizes have had similar experiences. The Russians and Chinese probably have divisions that collect up and examine unexplained phenomenon. It’s not out of the question that there is some contact between these government agencies, at least an acknowledgement that they exist for the same reasons.

The two possible explanations for the evidence are that it is the result of some completely unknown natural phenomenon or it is space aliens. Both answers would mean large gaps in our understanding of the natural world. Theoretical physicists have been at a dead end for a long time. Space exploration has been stalled for generations. Our understanding of our natural world is at its infancy. These phenomena could simply be more proof that we don’t know a whole lot.

Of course, if these are space aliens, it means some species well beyond our understanding has solved problems we cannot contemplate. For example, our best science is not all that sure humans can live in space long enough to travel beyond Mars and back, without dangerous physical consequences. If we are being visited by aliens, it means they solved the problem of carbon based life forms living in space for long periods without being destroyed by radiation.

It would also mean these aliens conquered the physical problem of traveling between galaxies. That means they either live long enough to go light years into space or they have invented propulsion devices that allow for speeds beyond anything we think is possible with what we know of physics. Alternatively, they have found a way to fold space in order to move from one location to another. Instead of physically traveling through space, they make space travel for them.

All of the possible explanations for how visitors from another world raise the age-old science fiction movie paradox. How could a race so advanced be so easily caught on our primitive video? If they have the ability to bend space, they will have the ability to bend light or at least have really good camouflage. They would see our primitive airships long before we were able to see them. These videos contradict the one possible answer for why they exist in the first place.

The answer to that could simply be that they are observing us and part of it is to see how humans react to limited exposure to the possibility of aliens. This could be nothing more than part of the simulation that is our existence. You can come up with all sorts of entirely unprovable explanations for why super intelligent space aliens are getting caught on video. If you want to believe in UFO’s, there’s always a way to maintain the belief in the face of this type of skepticism.

There is one other angle to the UFO stuff. It feeds the need to believe that our governments have super-secret stuff hidden away in super-secret government agencies run by X-Files types. For some reason, people need to believe this. It’s probably because deep down, people won’t except that their government is staffed by stupid people who got lucky. The fate of the world depends on a series or average people guessing the right way or making the right mistakes.

That could be the real psyop. The people in charge know that the rest of us need to think they have things under control. The fake UFO footage is intended to promote the idea that our government has these super-secret programs. If people believe that, they will believe the government screw-ups over foreign policy or economic affairs are really part of some super-secret scheme involving deep state actors. The real psyop is covering up the fact that we are ruled by lucky dimwits.

Litigating the Blood Libel

Posted on January 15, 2020 by thezman

Is the term “white nationalist” a slur? How about “white supremacist?” The general definition of a slur is “an insinuation or allegation about someone that is likely to insult them or damage their reputation.” For “white nationalist” to be a slur, the term itself would have to be generally accepted as immoral or derogatory. It would also have to be used in a way that incorrectly labels one a white nationalist. Calling Greg Johnson, a white nationalist, for example, is not a slur. He embraces the label.

The interpretation of the term white nationalist is just one interesting aspect of the lawsuit brought by Peter Brimelow, editor of VDare. He is suing the New York Times, according to Brimelow, for falsely labeling him a white nationalist. He not only denies being a white nationalist, he claims the company deliberately labeled him as such in an effort to damage his reputation, even after he made many good faith attempts to point out the error to them. He is seeking $5 million in damages.

That is the first interesting angle to this case. Intent is always a central part of defamation cases. The defendant must be shown to have intentionally libeled or slandered the other party. The statement must have been made with knowledge that it was untrue or with reckless disregard for the truth. Simply making an honest error is not defamation, which is why newspapers have always posted corrections. It allows them to show the false claim was an honest error.

Another interesting bit of this is the unspoken dispute over what exactly makes someone a white nationalist. Greg Johnson, for example, has written a book describing white nationalism. He calls himself a white nationalist. Peter Brimelow, in contrast, has never used to term to describe himself and has been generally negative toward the use of it as a label. No doubt both men share similar opinions on many matters, but they have many important differences as well.

Yoram Hazony has written a book promoting nationalism. He is a proud Zionist and an ethno-nationalist. Large swaths of his book match up well with the arguments made by Greg Johnson in favor of white nationalism. In fact, strip away the references to Israel and the Jews and Hazony’s book is the same argument made by Johnson. Does that make Hazony a white nationalist? Is white nationalism just another manifestation of nationalism, like Zionism or black nationalism?

If this case ever makes it to court, it would be an easy task to show a jury that the term white nationalist is undefined. Its meaning is entirely controlled by the intent of the person using it. When used by the New York Times, the intent is purely negative, perhaps even a synonym for evil. When used by normal people, it is more benign, maybe even positive. In other words, the definition is entirely one of context, which is the heart of the lawsuit against the Times.

That would be an amusing part of this case if it gets to the deposition phase, as everyone involved would have to define white nationalism. Brimelow would have no trouble giving an objective definition. The Times writers and editors would have to figure out a way to craft a definition that puts someone like Peter Brimelow at the same table as Johnson. That’s a circle that cannot be squared, without first asserting the promotion of white interests is negative.

That really is the secret that lies beneath all of this. The underlying assumption of the beautiful people at the New York Times is that white people have no right to promote their interests. Jews, blacks, one-legged trans-lesbians of color, all of these groups have interests and a right to promote them openly. Whites, according to the sorts working for the Times, have no group interests. Therefore, white nationalism is the assertion of something false, for malign purposes.

Now, there is yet another twist to this. From the perspective of someone like Greg Johnson, Brimelow’s suit against the Times can be seen as damaging the cause of white nationalism. The basis of the suit is that the Times deliberately libeled Brimelow by applying a derogatory term to him and his work. In other words, a putative ally is agreeing with the enemy that white nationalism is immoral. That further anathematizes the term and the issues associated with it.

In reality, that train has left the station. In fact, that is another important issue involved in this case and many others. The media is not simply an institution for disseminating factual information about people and events. No sane person would make such a claim, as the media repeatedly states otherwise. The mass media defines the public debate and largely defines public morality. When they pronounce something forbidden, like white nationalism, it usually becomes immoral and off-limits.

That brings us back to intent. There simply is no way the Times can claim they did not intend to libel Brimelow when they called him a white nationalist. There only hope is to conjure a definition of white nationalism that includes Brimelow along with other people, who sharply disagree with him. The only way to accomplish that is to broaden the term to mean any white person, who thinks white people have interests. In other words, merely being white makes you guilty enough in this case.

Finally, this case can be a useful on-ramp. These people are clever, in that they talk about whites in a negative way without directly addressing white people. In this case they have turned the phrase white nationalism into a purely negative term that they liberally apply to white people questioning orthodoxy. They don’t say whites are evil, but they regular claim “whiteness” is evil and that promoting it is immoral. They condemn the thing by condemning its nature.

In the end, this case can only be a net positive, assuming Brimelow and VDare don’t embarrass themselves in some unforeseen manner. Cases like this are a good way to raise this issue. The more people talk about how the Left systematically anathematizes the natural characteristics of white people, the more people will notice the blood libel at the heart of this case and the general war on white people. The reason the Times hates white nationalism is they hate white people.

The Virtue Of Impeachment

Posted on January 14, 2020 by thezman

According to official media, the House Democrats are finally ready to send the articles of impeachment over to the Senate for a trial. Assuming it actually happens, the trial will be a circus to allow the various crackpots and show ponies to perform for the cable news audiences. Everyone will pretend it is serious until the ratings come in from the polling operations and then the show will close. The only people who think otherwise are the cranks and weirdos on the Left.

That said, the inner party has permitted this charade to happen for more than just theatrical reasons. They have an election show scheduled for this year and that will provide plenty of entertainment. The Iowa Caucuses are a little over two weeks away and the New Hampshire primary is three weeks away. That’s more than enough entertainment to keep people from noticing too much. The question then is why are they bothering with this straight-to-video impeachment show.

Every society has certain codes of conduct that may or may not be formalized in writing, but are accepted by everyone. These codes may be amplified or prioritized by personal codes of conduct, but the general morality is accepted as the public morality. In many cases, it is assumed the morality of one’s society is a universal morality that applies to all times and places, but that is a confusion in terms. Codes of conduct that apply in narrow conditions are different from general social codes.

In the West, public morality says the people should be sovereign and pick representatives the people occupying public offices. The will of the people should be expressed in the law. In the Arab world, public morality is defined by the Koran, not Enlightenment philosophy. Therefore, government should be run by righteous Muslims, according to the rules of Islam. These are different codes of conduct, not expressions of a universal morality, like the prohibition against murder.

In current year America, the ruling class is now fully detached from the society over which it rules, so it has begun to acquire its own moral code. You see this in the Democrat primary where candidates are running around preaching about the plight of transvestites or lecturing on white privilege. To normal people, these are bizarre fetishes that have to salience. Inside the ruling class they have become important moral signifiers, rooted in the common morality of the ruling class.

That brings us back to impeachment. The official narrative says he has been impeached because the political class thinks he violated his oath of office in his dealings with Ukraine. The official alternative narrative is the Democrats did this out of spite over losing the 2016 election. Those are the two sides of the official sandwich regarding impeachment. Within that framing, both sides are expected to scream at one another through the proxy of cable news programs.

Then there is the official outsider view that says this is part of some grand chess strategy over the seditious plot conducted by the security agencies. The inner party is using impeachment to stall the investigation into the that and the many other corrupt projects during the Obama years. While there may be some truth to this, it is clear that Bill Barr is willing and able to cover all of this up on his own. Still, there may be some people in the party who would like the assurance that the caper is properly buried.

There may be another reason why this impeachment thing will not die and that is the evolving morality of the ruling class. They hate Trump, not because of what he does or even what he says. They hate him for who he is and who he represents. He is the rejection of their morality. The Democrats could make a spending deal with him in a heartbeat, but they refuse because to do so would legitimize him and what he represents to them. They simply cannot do that.

If you think about the last four years, the main argument against Trump by all sides of the political class is that he is lacking in character. Maybe the point of entry is his womanizing or his crude statements. The neoconservatives have endlessly lectured on his moral failings. The Israeli first zealot, Ben Shapiro, has repeatedly said he opposes Trump on moral grounds, despite giving the Zionists everything they ask. It turns out that “who they are” is not Trump and what he represents.

The one thing the ruling class gets right is that the American experiment is unique in world history. No society has tried to combine extreme egalitarianism, the blank slate and democracy into a civic religion. Since two legs of that stool are in direct conflict with human nature, that leaves two choices. One is the traditional radical approach of exterminating everything that does not fit the new morality. The other is to redefine one of the legs of the stool to solve the conflict.

What impeachment suggests is the leg in for redefining will be democracy. The new definition of it will be something like Henry Ford’s choice of colors. The people can vote for whomever they like, as long as the candidate comports with the public morality of the ruling class. Rules will evolve to make sure no one like Trump can every gain access to official Washington. The political elite will become a closed system with a unique set of moral codes.

That may be the real point of impeachment. People like Adam Schiff appear to be insane, but he is just one of the berserkers of the emerging new morality. The point is not to remove Trump, but to codify him in such a way that his presence reinforces the new morality. Inside Washington, impeachment is already a moral signifier. The looming impeachment show will give the faithful in the ruling elite a chance to publicly display their virtue to their coreligionists inside the ruling class.

Note: Some have asked why comments end up in moderation. This is the doings of the spam filter I’m using. It is often triggered by epithets, certain links and mysterious word combinations. These messages get flagged as possible spam. Now, in half a dozen years it has blocked over 3.5 million spam messages, so it is trade-off I accept. It means I check the moderation queue once an hour or so. I approve the real comments and trash the spam. Otherwise, there is no moderation.

Outsiders

Posted on January 13, 2020 by thezman

In every human society, large or small, there are people who don’t fit in with the main of the society. At the extreme end, these are criminals and subversives. At the more benign end there are oddballs and eccentrics. In small numbers they are harmless, just as long as they don’t form up into an organized whole. A criminal organization is a collection of people, who are no threat as individuals, but as a group they become a threat to the society. They become an alien body.

Human society is an organism. Like any organism, it must always be aware of threats to its existence, internal and external. A group of people inside society that is either hostile to the whole or merely alien to the whole must be treated as a threat. Since self-preservation is the prime directive of any organism, the most prudent approach is to treat the alien as hostile. To do otherwise risks making an error and allowing a hostile alien inside the society. That is a pointless risk.

Societies, like all living organisms have two general approaches to the problem of alien bodies inside the society. One is to destroy the alien body and the other is to isolate it and render it harmless. In the human being, the immune system will attack the foreign entity in an effort to kill it. If the foreign body in not a living thing, then infection will set in until the foreign body is removed. In some cases, the body will surround the item in a cocoon of calcium to isolate it and render it harmless.

In the case of human societies, the alien body is going to be people, like the criminal gang or some group of foreigners. For most of human history, this meant rounding up the aliens and executing them. Hanging criminals was the surest way to deal with the threat of people hostile to the whole. In the case of the non-violent, people who were just irritants, they would be expelled, Banishment solved the problem. This form of elimination allows the aliens to find a more suitable home.

Banishment also allows for reinstatement. A person or group that is cast out can, in theory, earn their way back inside. That requires a commitment to fit into the society and proof of rehabilitation. Banishment and the threat of it was a way to force people to assimilate into the society. A group of dissenters, for example, could remain just as long as they respected the wishes of the whole. Maybe they would be compelled to recant and accept the rules to which they were dissenting.

Human societies, like other living organisms, can isolate the problem. Prisons are really just a way of isolating the hostile foreign body. Instead of surrounding the criminals in calcium, they are placed in concrete boxes. Obviously, they can be permitted back into society, so it is not a perfect analogy, but the underlying logic is the same. Since modern societies do not want to execute trouble makers or banish them to the wilderness, they isolate them from the whole with prisons.

Segregation, formal and informal, is another way the problem of aliens is addressed by societies. The majority group forces the alien minority into a certain area and does not permit them outside that area. Segregation can be physical or logical. In the American South, segregation was mostly logical, as blacks and whites shared the same physical public spaces. In the North, it was physical as blacks were herded into ghettos and physically isolated from whites.

The story of Europe is really the story of people trying to figure out how to deal with aliens in their midst. Slowly and violently Europe has self-segregated. Every ethnic group has a place, either as a country or as a cultural zone within a country. There are notable exceptions, like gypsies, who roam about in all of Europe, but remain culturally at odds with the host population everywhere they live. Gypsies are an implacably alien nation within every nation they reside.

America, which has been multi-racial and multicultural since the beginning, has had another way of dealing with outsiders on the inside. That is to pretend they are not really outsiders. Some form of the phrase, “despite our differences we’re all Americans” is the national motto. The American creed is, in fact, built on this bit of self-deception about our differences. The fact that this is a big country with a low population density makes it easier to perpetuate the charade.

In Europe, a similar experiment is underway with the great homogenization within the European project. National identity is to be replaced with a European one. While less common, you can hear people say, “despite our differences, we are still Europeans” when talking about the current cultural and social unrest. In other words, the differences at the root of the social unrest are waved away and therefore the frictions are waved away as well. Everyone just has to pretend harder.

This actually works in the short run. Initially, the first generation of aliens bumping into one another want the new arrangement to work. They are willing to overlook the differences in favor of the assumed benefits. It is subsequent generations that begin to question the arrangement. They were not around to enjoy the giddy promise of the multicultural paradise. The kabob stands and food trucks are just part of the scenery of their life. What they see are the aliens around them.

This is the heart of the crisis in the West. Man is a social animal, who naturally wants to live in a society of people who look like him, sound like him, love the things that he loves and hates the things that he hates. Those are the invisible bonds that commit him to the other members and the other members to him. A society of strangers is not a society, but an ad hoc collection of people living outside their natural society. There is a word for such an arrangement. It is called a prison.

Our Emmanuel Goldstein

Posted on January 11, 2020 by thezman

One of the best observations Orwell had about totalitarian society is had to have an opponent, against which everyone must rally. It was not just a practical opponent, like another country. The forever bad guy had to have a spiritual dimension. In opposing the bad guy, the members of the society established their commitment to the cause and thus their standing in society. Emmanuel Goldstein in the Novel 1984 and Snowball in the novella Animal Farm are his famous examples.

Of course, modern totalitarian states are almost always the result of some mass movement that swept to power. Their ascent was either based on their promise to reform or their ability to demolish the prevailing order. Eric Hoffer noted that “mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.” The bogeymen in the Orwell novels were such devils. They were the center of the moral universe for the totalitarian society.

The important part of this bogeyman role is that the bad guy cannot simply be a man with whom you can reason or even conquer. The bad guy has to have supernatural abilities and maybe be unconquerable. In the 1984, Emmanuel Goldstein is powerful enough to cause all of the regimes troubles and smart enough to avoid getting caught by the party. The value of the supernatural enemy is that they can never truly be defeated, so they are a convenient scapegoat.

This is something to keep in mind with the bizarre obsession the ruling class has with Russian meddling. Like The Brotherhood in 1984, the concept of Russian election meddling was a fabrication by the inner party of America. Initially it was just part of the widespread seditious plot to overturn the 2016 election. It was the excuse to explain the criminal shenanigans. The media was tasked with spreading the concept and it became a part of the collective reality by the time Trump was in office.

Despite the fact that no one has every provided actual evidence the Russians or anyone other than the Israelis and Saudis have interfered in our elections, the Russian meddling meme persists. The Left is captivated by it. So much so the inner party feels they must persist in the charade. This story is a great example. In order to keep the true believers excited, the FBI squanders money in phony investigations into Russian election meddling. They would be better served hunting UFO’s.

Russia has become the Emmanuel Goldstein of current year America. Whenever things go wrong for the inner party, they blame Russia. If that’s not practical, they shift the focus to Russian in some other way. Maybe it is Russian meddling in the Middle East or South America. When a party member is struggling, as we see with Biden, then it must be the work of those evil Russians. You can be sure that is trump wins in 2020, we will get another round of “Russian hacking” allegations.

As with the Orwell figures, the Russian conspiracy stuff is not just about the practical things vexing the party. There is a moral dimension to it. “You are a Putin defender” has become one of the worst things a true believer can say to someone. Whenever the party member or even just a true believer is confronted with disconfirming facts, they instinctively suspect the person confronting them is allied with Russia. Just put the phrase “Tucker Carlson Russia” into Google.

This behavior would suggest we are in a soft version of the totalitarian states described by Orwell in the last century. There’s plenty of evidence to support that claim, but the lack of organization by the inner party suggests another possible explanation. That is, the inner party of the true believers operate like a school of fish. When one fish responds to something, the other fish respond. The beautiful ballet of the school of fish or flock of birds looks like design, but it is pure instinct.

The thing that holds the ruling class together is a shared morality that not only defines them, but gives purpose to their lives. The Judeo-Puritan morality of the American ruling class runs on shared believe, not central coordination. The Judeo side cannot not stop obsessing over their ancestral homelands in the Pale of Settlement. All of those old grudges remain fresh. The Puritan side is always in a life and death battle with Old Scratch, the forever tempter of the righteous.

Put the two together and the evolving those of the inner party has turned a relatively backward country between Europe and Asia into the great villain. It give purpose to their lives and justifies their actions. Whatever Russian does, they must oppose, but whatever they oppose, they assume Russia supports. This asynchronous relationship between themselves and the devil is the center of their moral universe. Literally, who they are is the opposition to Russian meddling.

Union Lessons

Posted on January 10, 2020 by thezman

This week is one of those times where the topic got away from me and the result was not what I expected. My initial plan was to do four or five segments on topics related to the early union movement. Maybe focus on five people or five notable strikes and then pivot to how they relate to our age. I like the five segment format as it pleases my sense of balance, so I thought five ten minute bits on these topics would work.

Then I started putting together the first segment and things got away from me. I quickly discovered that my own knowledge of the material was inadequate. There were things I had either forgotten or never learned. It was also clear that the topics I picked were bigger than what I can cover in ten minutes. This week’s show is a good example of what happens when you bite off more than you can chew.

Still, I like the topic and I’m going to come back to it. I also like the fact that much of this is forbidden knowledge. The union movement really is a great example of how the usual suspects hose the Left just like they hose the Right. The modern union movement is thoroughly incorporated into cosmopolitan globalism. When was the last time a modern Progressive gave a speech in favor of labor?

The union movement is also a great topic for dissidents, because it breaks that old conditioning most of us labor under, having come out of conservatism. If you were a libertarian or any sort of conservative, you were tuned to hate unions. That sense is still with us, but there is a lot dissidents can learn from the union movement. We face many of the same problems faced by labor a century ago.

The union movement is also a great way to begin thinking about the fact that not all things should be subject to market forces. There are things that are morally right because we believe them to be right on their face. Whether or not they hold up in the marketplace is immaterial. The treatment of our fellow citizens in the workplace is one of those things that should never be left to the marketplace.

This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00: Opening
05:00: Molly Maguires (Link) (Link)
25:00: Saboteurs & Provocateurs (Link) (Link)
45:00: Eugene V Debs (Link) (Link)
55:00: Closing

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

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

https://youtu.be/voLXcZnbGbM

Digital Grifters

Posted on January 9, 2020 by thezman

Like most slang terms, no one is entirely sure how the word “grifter” came into common usage, but it has been fairly common since the start of the last century. Researchers claim it was carnival slang that crossed over into common usage in the late 19th century and early 20th century. It was possibly a corruption of the word “graft”, another slang term that loosely meant financial crime. Either way, a look at Google Ngram shows it took off in the 1920’s and 1930’s.

One interesting fact about that graph is the usage of the word seems to track with the rise and fall of social trust. In the run up to World War Two, social trust began to decline for a number of reasons. One big one was the financial collapse and the subsequent economic depression in the 1930’s. The fact that the word is increasingly common today, starting in the 1980’s with the digital revolution, suggests a correlation. People are more exposed to corruption now than 30 years ago.

Putting that aside, the microprocessor revolution has changed many things in our culture, one of which is the nature of the confidence man. Before the internet, running a con was an intimate affair. The con man had to personally interact with the mark in order to earn his trust. That meant the con man had to be able to read people and control his own emotions and body language. He also had to understand his mark, so he could say and do things that played on the mark’s vanity.

The life of the analog con man was a dangerous one. Having to operate in close proximity with the mark meant physical risk. If the mark got wise, it could mean a beating or maybe worse. The analog con man therefore had to be highly skilled, but also possess some courage. Often, he was operating in a world with other criminals, maybe even targeting criminals. One mistake, knocking on the wrong door or targeting the wrong old lady, could mean physical harm.

That’s the first thing that has changed about grifting in the digital age. The con man can operate from a great distance, often in anonymity. He can put up a false website that lures people in, based on certain known characteristics. Alternatively, he can create a false persona on-line that ticks the boxes needed to appeal to a class of people the con man is targeting. The confidence game and marketing are often indistinguishable from one another on-line. It’s easier to be a con man now.

Unlike the analog con man, the digital con man no longer has to possess the personal skills to work a mark or a group of marks. They also have a much lower risk of being caught and they don’t have to worry about physical harm. The result is a lower barrier to entry, which means many more con men. In the depression of the 1930’s, money was scarcer so people were more aware of swindlers. Today, the number of swindlers is much higher, so the word “grifter” is more common.

Another difference between the analog and digital grifter is the former operated on a small scale. He had to work a small number of marks at any one time. The latter can work in volume. In fact, the digital con game works better when scaled up as it can then rely on social proof to draw in suckers. While analog grifting was a retail operation, often a bespoke business, the digital con man works wholesale. He skims a little from many people, who often do not notice the con.

One main way the digital grifter works is through front running. They find a fad that is building up steam on-line and rush to the front of it. This helps them get attention from the sorts of people who get caught up in fads. These are people that like being led and need social proof. Once the con establishes himself as a prominent person in the fad, he either asks for support or has something to sell. Think about all the Tea Party sites that offered merchandise ten years ago.

A great example of this is Mike Cernovich. He has jumped from one fad to the next, almost exclusively operating on Twitter. He jumped from fad to fad on-line until he struck pay dirt with his goofy self-help book. He then re-titled it for the Trump era and became a leader of the MAGA cult on-line. When Trump got into office, he then started claiming to be a White House insider. His front-running of Trump allowed him to move a lot of merchandise and establish his brand.

That’s the other aspect of the digital grift. In addition to front running, the digital grifter is always looking to free ride. They look for a movement or fad forming up on-line and then come in with something to sell. It may be a book targeted at the vanity of the people in the movement. E-books are a popular item, because they are cheap to produce and don’t require a lot of work. Video is another, as it can monetize the front-running aspect with just the cost of a webcam.

The real pros in this segment were on display when it looked like Trump was contemplating war with Iran. The cable chat shows were littered with people ready to sell a book on their alleged inside knowledge of Trump, the war planning or the Iranian regime. The same people who peddled books for or against Trump three years ago were going to selling war books. Cable news was a grifter’s ball for a few nights, until Trump pulled the plug on the ear machine.

One similarity between the analog and digital grifter is that the mark builds what he thinks is a strong personal bond with the con man. In an atomized world of deracinated bugmen, there are tens of millions of people willing to follow a guy on-line. Just as lonely old shut-ins were easy marks for the analog grifter, the intensely on-line, who lack the normal personal connections in the physical world, are easy targets for the digital confidence man.

The low barrier to entry means we are Carny Town. The question that remains unanswered is that of cause and effect. Is the proliferation of con men on-line driving down social trust? Is the decline in social trust opening the flood gates for the con men to pour into our lives? Another possibility is that both are driven by the breakdown of white community. A world of atomized strangers is a fertile hunting ground for sociopaths, serial killers and confidence men.

The Compound Eye

Posted on January 8, 2020 by thezman

Compound eyes, common with insects and crustaceans, are made up of thousands of individual visual receptors, called ommatidia. Each ommatidium is a fully functioning eye in itself. The insect’s “eye” is thousands of ommatidium that together create a broad field of vision. Every ommatidium has its own nerve fiber connecting to the optic nerve, which relays information to the brain. The brain then processes these inputs to create a three-dimensional understanding the surrounding space.

The compound eye is a good way to imagine how the surveillance state will keep tabs on the subjects in the near future. Unlike the dystopian future imagined by science fiction, it will not be one eye focusing on one heretic, following him around as he goes about his business. Instead it will be tens of millions of eyes obtaining various bits of information, sending it back to the data-centers run by Big Tech. That information will be assembled into the broad mosaic that is daily life.

For example, rather than use informants and undercover operatives to flesh out conspiracies against the state, the surveillance state will use community detection to model the network of heretics. Since everyone is hooked into the grid in some fashion and everyone addresses nodes of the grid on a regular basis, keeping track of someone is now something that can be done from a cubicle. There is no need to actually follow someone around as they go about their life.

For example, everyone has a mobile phone. At every point, the phone is tracking its location, which means it is tracking your location. It also knows the time and day when you go into various businesses. Most people use cards to pay miscellaneous items, so just that information would tell the curious a lot about you. Combine that information with the same information from other phones that come into close proximity with your phone and figuring out the community structure is simple.

Of course, the mobile phone is not the only input device. Over Christmas, millions of Americans were encouraged to install surveillance devices in their homes by friends and family. Maybe it was an Alexa listening device from Amazon or a Nest Doorbell surveillance device from Google. All of these gadgets are collecting data on your life inside and around your home. It is then fed to the same data-centers that have all of your movements and associations collected from your phone.

That’s an enormous amount information about the lives of the subjects, but that’s just the start of what they are collecting. Everything about property and property ownership is now kept in those same systems. Tax and earnings information are now shared with the new technological overlords. We know this because Raj Chetty told us so. He gained access to everyone’s tax information from the IRS. Since Big Tech provides the infrastructure to all government operations, they have their data too.

It turns out that the future will not be one big eye searching about for a heretic on which to focus or even thousands of such eyes. Instead, it will be tens of millions of eyes, collecting data, filtering it through a specific lens, and passing it onto massive data-centers controlled by Big Tech. It is there where the focus will narrow, looking for patterns, modeling communities and searching for any anomalies that could indicate unacceptable behavior. Big Brother will be an Indian in a cubicle.

The human eye is attached to muscles that allow it to move, expanding the field of vision and narrow in on specific items of interest. The compound eye is fixed and therefore cannot focus on a single item. It also results in nearsightedness. It is, however, exceptional at detecting motion. The mosaic of infinitesimally small images lets the insect notice the smallest movement around it. This is why flies, for example, are so good at anticipating your effort to swat them.

Big Tech’s compound eye will be similar. It will be adept at tracking movement and capturing data about the environment, but it will not be very good at focusing in on one individual or even a group of individuals. That’s where the brain takes over to interpret the data, looking for the sorts of movement that could present danger. As with insects, the compound eye has evolved for defensive purpose. Hunters need focus, prey need a broad field of vision and pattern matching.

We are seeing the precursors of what will be special teams of agents charged with focusing in on potential trouble. Those “Trust & Safety” squads on social media are the early attempts at this. Algos were created to look for patterns and movement that would then warrant further review. The “focus teams” then look more carefully at individuals inside an identified community. This is how a heretic gets banned from Twitter despite not using the system very much. He was part of an identified community.

In the future, these “Trust & Safety” teams will be dispatched into the real world to infiltrate suspected communities, disrupt social bonding within dissident communities that are forming up and, of course, neutralize genuine threats. That last part is always what the dystopians focus on, but that will be an exceedingly rare occurrence as we move into the custodial state. Technological advance will also bring with it new ways to influence behavior in a myriad of small ways.

Alongside those millions of eyes collecting data will be other nodes that nudge people in the right direction through the power of suggestion, social proof and social bonding. The Chinese social credit system is a crude example of what is to come. A much more subtle version will rely on social influencers, who will be rewarded for encouraging positive behaviors. Social proof and fear of ostracism will confirm the tendency to accept what comes from prominent influencers.

This is already happening in a crude way on social media platforms. They promote those with the right opinions and demote those with the wrong opinions. Since active users seek an audience, inevitably they act in such a way that gets them promoted by the algos running these sites. It is why review sites have abandoned real user reviews in favor of robots. It is a lot easier to push a movie on a movie review site if the “viewer reviews” are actually robots run by the site.

That’s the future that awaits us in the custodial state. It is living under the watchful compound eye that is feeding all of our data into massive data-centers controlled by private companies. Since information is the ultimate currency and controlling the currency makes you sovereign, the official state will simply become another node on the network run by the Big Tech. There will be no recourse. Any effort to revolt will be detected by the compound eye before it gets started.

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Monthly Archives: January 2020