The Decoupling

Posted on January 31, 2021 by thezman

Once you have been on this side of the great divide for a while, you end up in another place that is not obvious when you first make the journey. That is, you look on at conventional politics with a bemused detachment. Since it is obvious to you that it is all theater, you wonder why some of them put so much effort into the performance. Why does Elizabeth Warren, for example, feel the need to carry on like the champion of the little guy over GameStop? What is the point of this charade?

It could be that her script writers and directors have told her there are tribes on the Left that need to see this show. Maybe they think the Bernie Bros are starting to wise up about what is happening and need a booster shot. It is not as if she is going to follow through and do anything about the shenanigans. Even if she wanted to, she lacks the authority and she has no influence over those who do have authority. The SEC and FBI laugh when they hear a politician demand anything from them.

We live in a country where the FBI can manufacture evidence in an effort to overturn a presidential election and nothing happens. Thus far, one guy was charged with faking evidence to a FISA court. He confessed, as he was caught red-handed, but he received less than what drunk drivers get these days. He is a hero to the Bureau, because he took his pinch like a man. He kept his mouth shut and he learned the two greatest things in life. Never rat on your friends and always keep your mouth shut.

In the case of GameStop and the shenanigans surrounding it, the players are not punks doing small crimes like that FBI stiff. These are shot callers who bankroll the political system and control the economy. They already own dingbats like Warren and Ocasio-Cortez, so they have no fear of them. They probably have them on mute as no sober man would want to listen to those two for more than five minutes. Their prattling on about this issue is pointless.

This is the reality that has been brought home over the last decade. The election of Trump was that last desperate attempt by normal people to shake some sense into the managerial class, so they would start enforcing the rules again. Even people on this side of the great divide held out hope that this would be a wake-up call and the Overton window would slide this way, allowing for discussion of the root causes of the current crisis in the American Empire. None of that happened.

All you have to do is look back at posts here from a few years ago. Look at the comments and you see familiar names holding out hope that the investigations into the FBI would become a catalyst to reform. Even the most jaded on this side of the great divide had some hope. Not puppy dogs and rainbow hope, but the sort that thinks the people in charge will sense their interests are at stake and they will adjust out of self-preservation or maybe as a way to gain some advantage.

This is one of those changes for which we have no precedent. All of a sudden, we have a significant number of people who look at convectional politics as a joke. Instead of being angry and banging away on social media or sending off an e-mail to the nearest Republican, millions are just detaching from it. Outrage theater can only work if people are engaged in the system. We are in the midst of a great decoupling, where millions detach from the system and attach to independent systems.

In the past, the political culture provided for both satisfaction and dissatisfaction with the current policies. Those who were happy would get to see people inside the system being happy, so they could mimic them in their happiness, getting the same dopamine hit as if they were actually benefitting from the policy. Similarly, unhappy people could find a performer in the system being angry and outraged. They would mimic that behavior to get the satisfaction of feeling wronged.

Those of us fully decoupled from the system no longer get those neurological responses from the performers in the system. Their outrage and gloating strike us as ridiculous and bit absurd. A goofy old dingbat like Elizabeth Warren barely has comedic value. Watching her is like watching a 1970’s comic in a denim suit telling Nixon jokes. Similarly, Ocasio-Cortez is just a reminder of why you are glad you are no longer on Twitter. Millennial dingbats are a dime-a-dozen.

What we are seeing is a great decoupling. The shuttering of the social media sites to tens of millions of people breaks the connection. Many have ended up on Gab, connecting to a different social dynamic. Others are heading to other places like Telegram, connecting to boutique communities. Some will no doubt re-attach to Conservative Inc., but there is not much there to offer the person looking for a way to express their unhappiness.

The political system that has evolved to this point has counted on greater and greater engagement at increasing levels of emotion. What happens when those dials start moving the other way is unknown and unconsidered. When tens of millions shrug and laugh at the pleas from Conservative Inc. or mock the phony rage heads from the chat shows, how does the system respond? Turn up the volume? Send their crazies back out to poke people with sticks like they did last summer?

A new year brings new changes. The same is true for this site as we adjust to the reality of managerial authoritarianism. That means embracing crypto for when the inevitable happens and the traditional outlets are closed. Now more than ever it is important to support the voices that support you. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you prefer other ways of donating, look at the donate page. Thank you.

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Past Comparisons

Posted on January 29, 2021 by thezman

Way back in the old days, politicians in trouble with their voters would often be described as “tone deaf” by their less harsh critics. They were in trouble because they no longer had the ability to hear how they sounded to their voters. They would say things that were maybe acceptable behind closed doors in Washington but should never be said in public. Maybe they were prone to saying true things that were best left unsaid or that confirmed things people suspected about the guy.

That is not an expression you hear these days. No one care about how one sounds to the Dirt People, as that no longer matters. What really matters is how you sound to the Cloud People, a lesson Donald Trump learned. The media no longer talks about this either, as they are just as self-absorbed as the rest of them. The result is our politics is now constructed behind soundproof glass. On one side are the politics actors, performing their routines to piped-in cheers from the crowd.

On the other side of the glass is the rest of us, watching an increasingly bizarre political theater performed by increasingly grotesque actors. One performance this week was the arrest of Douglass Mackey, the pro-Trump on-line personality who played the role of Ricky Vaughn on Twitter back in 2016. He was arrested and charged with the crime of disrespecting the regime. The weirdos on the other side of the glass now think it is a good idea to arrest people who hurt their feelings.

The other show was the collusion between the Biden White House and some hedge fund pirates to prevent retail investors from making money at their expense. Instead of letting a few of these guys sink to teach the rest a lesson, the regime swept in and forced the trading platforms to manipulate the market so the bog players could get out from under their bad bets. We literally saw the head of NASDAQ say that they had to manipulate the market so big players could be protected.

This is what the old guys used to call tone deaf. Of course, in our new woke society, “tone deaf” is probably the name of the new Secretary of Housing. Putting that aside, for no reason other than spite the regime convinced millions of people that they no longer have first amendment rights, and the financial markets are every bit as crooked as their elections. They are doing this at the same time they are babbling about the need for unity after they rigged the last election.

It really is an amazing time to be alive. Most people reading this are over forty, so you remember when it was radicals on the college campus claiming that America was a lie and that a cabal of sinister players really ran the country. The people saying this never ventured off the college campus and were happy to live off the system, but they were sure the system was a lie. Now, those people are in charge and not only were they right about the system being a lie, it is normal people saying it now.

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. I am now on Deezer, for our European haters and Stitcher for the weirdos. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

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This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00: Opening
02:00: Pre-Revolutionary Reformers (Link) (Link)
17:00: The Isolation of Our Rulers (Link)
32:00: The Foreignness Of Our Rulers
47:00: Kim Philby (Link)
57:00: Closing (Link) (Be Like Me)

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

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

https://youtu.be/SzNMzfnj2No

GameStop

Posted on January 28, 2021 by thezman

Until a few days ago, most people had no reason to think about GameStop, a retail chain that sells video games and accessories. If you have kids, you probably know the place, because your kids like to go there. Otherwise, the only reason to think about the place was to wonder how they managed to survive as a brick-and-mortar operation in a world dominated by on-line retailers. They exist as a reminder that humans still prefer in-person shopping, even if it comes at a premium.

That is the funny thing about the GameStop story. While other traditional retailers struggled to maintain margins, they are an exception. This is a company with ridiculously high margins. Even with a drop in sales due to the great reset launched by the managerial class this year, they maintained their margins. Whatever they are doing in their shops, people think it is worth a premium. Despite this, their stock was a dog, falling below $4 until the recent explosion.

It is the explosion in their share price that has them in the news. The share price as of the close of business yesterday was $347.51. The pre-market ask is $489.00 as these words are being typed. That number keeps going up, so it is not unreasonable to think that shares will be trading at or above $500 today. Everyone now wants a piece of the winningest stock since the dot-com bubble. If you had this company in your portfolio six months ago, you are a very happy investor.

Of course, this explosion in share price did not happen because everyone suddenly realized this was a great company. The story here is retail investors organizing on Reddit noticed that some big hedge funds were shorting the hell out of the stock, despite its depressed price. Shorting a stock is when you borrow shares of the stock and then sell them, hoping to buy them back at a lower price. You then return them to the lender, and you collect the difference.

These hedge funds took this a step further and borrowed shares that did not actually exist, which is called naked short selling. Basically, the center of the naked short sell is a promise to sell the shares at a price on a certain date. If the seller is unable to borrow those shares, then they must go into the market and buy them. If the price is below the promised price, no problem. If not or if the shares are simply not available to be purchased, then it is a very big problem.

This is where we are in the story of GameStop. At least one hedge fund was committed to delivering shares of this company at a few bucks per share, but now the shares are many times higher and becoming something close to unobtanium. The result is the hedge fund, Melvin Capital, has been wiped out. They had to liquidate all of their other holdings to cover their short position. Even with help from other hedge funds, they will file for bankruptcy next week.

By itself, this is an amusing story, but hardly big news. But, no one really knows if this is an isolated situation. The insiders were targeting a number of companies, hoping to jawbone down their share prices while they aggressively shorted those stocks. It is not unrealistic to think there are dozens of hedge funds out there working this grift, so this could be the tip of a much larger iceberg. The movie chain AMC Entertainment is seeing its stock follow GameStop for the same reasons.

Now, this may not sound very interesting, but even in today’s world of magical finance, math still matters. If you have to raise cash to cover your bad bet on a naked short sell, it means selling something to raise the cash. Hedge funds tend not to sell their furniture or expensive sports cars, so they sell their good holdings. Usually, they sell their best holdings, as they are the most liquid. If enough hedge funds are forced to liquidate their good holdings, those holdings will decline in price.

This is the great fear in these situations. No one knows how much exposure there is to this bad trade. That is why the general market will decline, as the robots that do almost all of the trading move into the safest of safe harbors. This, in turn, can result in selling of otherwise solid assets, simply because no one wants to be holding an asset in decline, especially in a declining market. Given the ridiculously inflated share values, this short squeeze could signal a very big correction.

It could also be a big nothing or it could mean the government comes in and makes everything right with bailouts or new rules to prevent further erosion. That really is the story here with GameStop. This revolt of small retail investors against this hedge fund is about the larger issue. The marketplace has been perverted by insiders with special access to both market makers and market regulators. The financial markets are no longer tethered to economic reality. It is just a giant bust out.

This is why this event is being compared to Gamergate. Like the populist revolts we have seen all over the culture the last ten years, this organized attack by small investors is about a larger issue. The institutions we are supposed to rely upon to regulate our lives have been corrupted by managerial insiders. Just as the marketplace of ideas is now manipulated by thugs and lunatics on behalf of the oligarchs, the financial markets have become a grift operated by wealthy insiders.

What this means, of course, is that the insiders getting hurt in this will go to their colleagues in the ruling class and have the insurgents crushed. These people will be pushed off public forums, have their accounts closed by the trading companies and some will probably be arrested on made up charges. In a society where mocking the rulers on Twitter could get you ten years in prison, anything is possible. The ruling class will not be mocked or defied.

On the other hand, it is great example of how to resist managerial tyrants. These people will not be talked out of their corruption. They have no scruples, so they cannot be shamed into doing the right thing. They have real power, so they cannot be removed from their positions. The only course is to drive up the cost for them. Throwing sand in the gears whenever possible drives up the cost of rule. Eventually, the managerial state becomes the naked short sell and has to be liquidated.

Cats And Dogs

Posted on January 27, 2021 by thezman

Anyone who has had a cat knows that the cat takes a certain pleasure in the acquisition of its food. Put food down for the dog and the dog eats the food. Put food down for the cat and it will saunter up to the dish and maybe sample a little, then take a break to watch the dish for a while, before returning for some more food. A bug gets loose in the house and the dog will just eat it, but the cat will torment the thing to death. One animal is all about the process, while the other is about the result.

This difference is something to keep in mind as America descends into the woke totalitarianism of our diversity loving masters. It is assumed that totalitarianism leads to labor camps and people disappearing in the night. Those are the examples we have from our history. The communists liked sending the uncooperative to work camps, while the fascist like shooting the inconvenient. In both cases, the point was to remove the problem and discourage others from being a problem.

Those old school totalitarians were dog people. Just as the dog is happy to eat when hungry, without thinking much about how the food was made available to him, the old totalitarians took an end justifies the means approach to exercising power. Problem people were like any other sort of problem. The point was to solve the problem, which in the case of people meant making them go away. No man, no problem. How the problem felt about what was happening was of no consideration.

Our new totalitarians turn all of this on its head. Like the cat and his food, or his prey in the case of an unfortunate insect, the end is not really the point. It is not about removing the obstacles to their project, in order to achieve some end. The dealing with the problem is the end. In the case of the poor unfortunate who has run afoul of the rulers, the point of the process is submitting the troublemaker to endless torment that has no purpose beyond the pleasure of the tormentor.

Take the doxing business as an example. The people who do this are not trying to make the victim go away, any more than the cat wants the wayward cricket to go away. To the contrary, they hope the victim will cry out in agony and make his misery into a long-drawn-out public performance. They revel in seeing the victim moan about how his PayPal was deleted or how he lost his job. For the army of the woke, the suffering of the victim and the fame for inflicting that suffering is what matters.

When the victim simply kills off his internet character, the doxers have a problem as they do not have that living trophy to show off on-line. They are forced to go onto their social media platforms and imagine how the victim is suffering. We are not far away from a time when Twitter or Facebook start creating scapegoat accounts for the anointed to attack as a part of their rituals. Instead of relying on a real person to be the victim, they will conjure a fake one that plays the victim properly.

Of course, in every totalitarian society, the people eventually figure out the rules in order to avoid the boot. That was the point of the old totalitarian model. In the new totalitarian model, the rules will constantly change so it is nearly impossible to avoid the wrath of the official tormentors. After all, like the cat tormenting its prey, the new totalitarians care only for the process. Like an engine needs fuel, the new totalitarians need a constant supply of victims to torment.

An excellent example of this is the Covid madness. When it all started, the point was to slow the spread so the hospitals would not be too crowded. We had two weeks to flatten the curve, but after two weeks the rules changed. The rules keep changing as the rulers find new ways to torment us, causing people to go into the streets to protest the new torments, to the delight of the tormentors. Covid has revealed that the new totalitarians are little more than sadists.

What this means, of course, is that there will be not settling into a set of fixed rules as happened in communist societies. We do not know if this would have happened in certain fascist societies, but the experience of Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal and Pinochet’s Chile suggest the fascists would have settled into a conservative system of fixed rules. The new system, in contrast, will be perpetually disrupting this tendency in order to perpetuate the necessary disorderliness.

The question is whether any society can go on very long when the rules are constantly changing in order to give the Torquemada’s more victims. A bedrock requirement for any society is a set of rules to govern conduct. In order to have an organization of humans greater than the Dunbar number means having a code and a way to enforce that code in order to make the code a habit of mind. This is what we think of when we think of culture. The rules we live by because we just do.

We are already seeing problems with the Covid madness. The ever-changing rules are making life impossible for small business. In some areas, whole swaths of the economy have collapsed. Of course, the religious aspects to compliance are pitting people against one another. The new totalitarians are creating a Hobbesian world where it is a war of all against all, not for limited resources, but due to the deliberate cacophony of every changing rules that have no logic.

The good news, if there is any, is that totalitarianism has diminishing returns, as the cost of maintaining it eventually dwarfs the benefits. Initially it seems to work pretty well, but over time the costs become unsustainable. This new totalitarianism is especially front loaded, almost accelerationist. It is destroying every reason for people to remain loyal to the system. Instead of carrying on for several generations, the new totalitarianism will be lucky to make it past this decade.

Trade-Offs

Posted on January 26, 2021 by thezman

Political systems are about problem solving. Inherited rule, for example, solves the problem of selecting the next ruler. Blood also provides legitimacy, which is an essential element for any ruler. One of the problems a political system must solve is the problem of trade-offs. Public policy, regardless of the system, is about trade-offs. A political system has to have a mechanism for selecting between competing options, by weighing the trade-offs and determining the best choice.

A great story from the ancient world about trade-offs is the story of the emperor Tiberius and flexible glass. A craftsman was presented to the emperor claiming that he could make flexible glass. That is, a substance that looked and functioned like glass, but did not break like glass. He produced a bowl that the emperor tried to smash, but it only suffered some dents. The craftsman then repaired it with a small hammer, knocking out the dents made by the emperor.

Once the emperor was assured that no one else knew how to make this new material, he had the craftsman beheaded. The reason was that Tiberius saw right away that this material was revolutionary. Innovation always comes with trade-offs, as the new thing replaces an old thing. In the case of flexible glass, the trade-offs were incalculable, so the proper course was to make sure this new material never got loose. Tiberius chose the well understood over the completely unknown.

This story is useful to us today, because we have lived through what could be described as a series of flexible bowl incidents. The technological revolution that was set in motion by the microprocessor has swept through the West. As Tiberius anticipated with flexible glass, the silicon chip has set off changes that no one anticipated. In the material sense, our world is quite different from 70 years ago. In a cultural and political sense, we now live at the other end of a perpetual revolution.

In theory, democratic systems of government are about solving the problem of the general will. Through the ballot, the people tell the office holders what they want from their government. In turn, the people in office try to guide the general will through public debate and public advocacy for their ideas. The trade-offs involved in the options being debated are fleshed out and the public, directly, or indirectly, makes their choice and that becomes public policy.

The trouble is the system always selects for innovation over continuity. When the microprocessor came along, there could be no debate about whether this was a dangerous new innovation or how best to prevent this radical new thing from overthrowing the old rules. Democracy always comes down on the side of the new thing over the old thing. Every innovation, no matter how pointless, is celebrated as another step in human progress. Democracy is a perpetual revolution.

As a result, there could be no Tiberius moment with the microchip. There was not one to examine the new thing and contemplate its ramifications. Instead, it was quickly adopted setting off the technological age. Not only did no one think about the trade-offs before unleashing this new thing, not one thought about them afterwards. New is always good in a democratic society. The only thing better than innovation is more and faster innovation. Constant change is the ethos of liberal democracy.

The technological revolution was expected to solve lots of problems that plagued the industrial age. Society was supposed to become more democratic, for example, as improvements in communication made it easier for people to express their preferences in the public square. The distribution of goods would become more equitable, as innovation would smash the old bottlenecks. The technological revolution would make the world flatter, more egalitarian and more peaceful.

Some of the promised benefits have happened, but the trade-offs have been enormous and could very well be the end of us. For example, the cost of being able to call anyone anywhere from a device that fits in your pocket is having millions of people experiencing the lives through their phone. All the benefits of the mobile phone were realized with the first car phone. Everything that has came after that point has been the trade-off that no one could imagine. Most of them negative.

Similarly, the cost of instant communication across time and place is millions of people standing in front of a firehose of information. Humans are not made to experience the world this way. One result is everyone is dumber and less informed. Another result is the number of rage heads screaming in the face of their fellow citizens is growing exponentially. The cost of knowing what is on everyone’s mind is knowing what is on everyone’s mind whether you like it or not.

Again, this is not to say the technological revolution is a mistake. E-mail is better than the postal service. Modern automobiles are better and safer than their analog variants from the old days. Having the sum of human information at your fingertips is an amazing leap forward for humanity. There has been great material progress that has come with the technological revolution, but it came with a price. The question the West is slamming into is whether that price is warranted.

The trouble is democracy is incapable of evaluating trade-offs. This may be why our systems are becoming increasingly authoritarian. The only way to tone down the rhetoric in public forums is for the heavy hand of the ruling class to limit what can be said in public forums. The only way to break people from being constantly on-line is to make on-line less rewarding. There is no democratic way to get rid of Twitter and Facebook, so we get an authoritarian approach.

The trouble, of course, is that the current ruling class is the product of the democratic system that created this mess. These are people bred to overturn the tried and true in favor of the novel. That instinct is seen in their fetish for men in dresses. They are attracted to it because it is disruptive. Our ruling class is was selected by a system that rewards pointless novelty over sober mindedness. A ruling class of such people means we are ruled by a class of powerful toddlers.

That may be the next turn of the wheel. Democratic dictatorship gives way to some form of personal rule, where stability and continuity are prized over innovation. The ruling class is symbolically and physically walling itself off from us, but what comes next is a culling inside those walls. The feckless and stupid will be pushed out as a matter of survival, by those actually capable of wielding power. That will be a trade-off that everyone can accept, because it brings stability.

The Cult Of Safety

Posted on January 25, 2021 by thezman

For most of human history, the focus of society was on the material side. Progress was about increasing the material wellbeing of people. In fact, political philosophy was solely focused on material well-being. The great battle in the West was over what sort of political economy would provide the most stuff for the most people. Eventually, liberal democracy won over communism. Then the debate subtly changed from material well-being to the overall safety of people. Safety is the new goal.

For example, an increasingly common thing if you work in an office is the notice that the vents will be cleaned one night. You are told to expect some disruption of your day or maybe some things will be moved around in the office. A crew comes in to clean the vents for so everyone is safe. Residential rental properties are now required in most states to have the dryer vents cleaned once a year. In some states, home owners are required to do this too. Vent cleaning is a thing now.

It is more than just a thing. It is a booming little niche business. According to one of the rapidly growing vent cleaning companies, the demand for vent cleaning is growing at close to four percent per year. They say that the increased awareness to the dangers posed by home clothes dryers is what is driving the growth. The claim is the number of accidents caused by these appliances is making people suspicious of what’s happening in those vents, so they want all the vets cleaned regularly.

Of course, This is true to a great degree. In the office space, people have come to believe that whatever is being cleaned out of those heat and air conditioning ducts is bad for the people inside the offices. Sick building syndrome is one of those things people have come to accept without question. The same is true of the dangers posed by the common household dryer. Mention this to someone and they will claim that clothes dryers cause a lot of fires every year.

Interestingly, none of this is true. According to the government, there are about 2900 dryer fires per year. There is no data on fires caused by debris or dust in the ventilation ducts of buildings. The damage resulting from those dryer fires total $35 million per year. Only about a third is caused by too much fuzz in the dryer vent, so that means it is a $12 million problem. Put another way, we have a $350 million dollar industry to solve a problem a bit less serious than bathtub drownings.

The other odd thing about the vent cleaning craze is that people don’t bother questioning it. They just assume it is a real thing. If you ask someone about the dryer vent business, they will fight you about the facts, claiming that clothes dryers have always been a menace. If you point out the facts, they get mad at you, as if you are questioning a tenant of their religion. Seemingly out of nowhere, vent cleaning has become an important part of keeping us safe.

That is the key to it. Safety has become something of a religion. After all, you can never be too safe. We know this because we are constantly being told by the mass media and our government that we can never be too safe. We spent trillions waging a crusade against Muslims because we had to be safe from terror. We are now spending trillions on Covid, so we can be safe from illness. We’re all in this together, whether we like it or not, because our safety is what matters.

This explains, in part, the bizarre over reaction we saw from our rulers over the protests in Washington. These are the high priests of the cult of safety. They live the safest of lives and depend on faith in safety for their existence. This reminder that no one can ever be truly safe, especially the rulers of a society, was like telling them that their gods are completely fake. They proved that was a lie by turning their palaces into fortified bunkers guarded by heavily armed soldiers.

An easy to miss subtext to the continued lockdowns is the claim that working at home is safer than going to the office. Children at school skin knees and bump their heads, which does not happen when schools are closed. Fewer people commuting means fewer car accidents. The annual flu has been eradicated, they claim, because everyone stays home, instead of mingling with the public. Even if our heroes defeat Covid, staying home is just safer and safer is always better.

There is an obvious problem with this. It is really hard to run a human society when everyone is locked in their pods. Some people can work at home, for sure, but most people need supervision. We are social animals and our sense of self is tied to our participation in our group. This extends to society as a whole. People in isolation from one another or isolated into little tribes lose their group identity. They begin to take on the mentality of prisoners, rather than citizens.

There are also the diminishing returns. The dryer vent business is a great example of how not to solve a problem. An iron rule of life is the solution can never be more expensive than the problem. The dryer vent issue is a great example of how the price of being safer far outweighs the value of being safer. We have long since passed the point of diminishing returns regarding safety. Since there is no limiting principle to the religion of safety, we keep trying anyway, despite the cost.

An easy to overlook angle here is the fact that these efforts to insulate ourselves from risk must fail. The dominant justification for the current arrangements is that it is making us safer. At some point, something bad happens and people will suddenly be less safe. A recession, for example. The gods of safety will be proven to be false or feckless gods. Faith depends on confirmation and nothing harms a religion like a bit of disconfirmation, which in this case is inevitable.

Then again, perhaps we have reached the point in our development that the Eloi reached in the novel Time Machine. The protagonist, having observed the Eloi, the humans of the future, noted that “strength is the outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness.” That is modern people. We are now too weak and feeble to question our arrangements. Instead, all that matters is the sense of safety and security, whether is real or imagined. Safety is now our god.

Taki Post: The New Regime

Posted on January 25, 2021 by thezman

If you were to round up a random collection of people and lock them up in a school gymnasium, you would have a bunch of people locked in a gymnasium. It would not be a society or a movement or a religion. The reason is those people would have nothing in common, other than the fact that they had been lured to the gymnasium and were now being held against their will.

Now, round up a random collection of people and put them on an island far enough away from land that they could not chance making a swim for it. Maybe they do not even know where the island is in relation to a large, populated landmass. Further, they have no indication that they will be rescued. They are there possibly forever. Unlike the people locked in the gymnasium, this group will begin to change in character….

The rest is here.

Three Crises

Posted on January 22, 2021 by thezman

Note: You may have observed some site outages over the last week or so and rest assured we have top men on the case. It seems that traffic volumes have reached a critical point, so some upgrades are in order.

Last week, in his weekly broadcast, the great John Derbyshire mentioned some of the looming threats to our peace and prosperity. I have been thinking about some of the same things and decided this week to take a swing at the topic as well. At the start of every year, I sit down and write out some goals and evaluate my finances, in order to have some structure for my activities. Like everyone, my plans are ambitious, but each new year brings hope, despite by dwindling years.

As a result, I am in the frame of mind to think about the monsters that may be lying in wait or the trillion-dollar bills that may lying on the ground, waiting for someone to come along and pick it up. With all the hubbub about the election and the response to it by our increasingly reactionary rulers, it is hard to think much about anything else. Still, you have to look ahead and what I see is not a pretty picture. This coming year could very well make 2020 look like the good old days.

To be perfectly honest, I am not sure it is such a bad thing that the collection of time-serving hacks and criminals that is the Biden administration will be charged with managing our way through the minefield of 2021. Much of what lies ahead is the creation of the ruling class. Maybe they can more easily undo what they have wrought than a Trump team facing constant opposition. At the minimum, The Pretender can call off the BLM and Antifa mobs that have been running wild.

If they are unable to navigate their way through the minefield they created, then it clarifies things for us. The thing none of them seem to grasp at the moment is they own it all now. Prior to Trump they could play the good cop – worse cop routine with the GOP presenting themselves to us as the least bad option. The Democrats, of course, did the same to their coalition. Right now, that option is not available to them, as both parties have stopped pretending to be opponents.

Of course, when looking ahead you cannot see around corners or see the knock-on effects that will come from whatever they do to fix what they broke. Wise heads have been pointing out for a year, for example, that the economy is a very complicated system that no one really understands in full, much less detail. Smashing it with the Covid hammer will create lots of unknown unknowns. The same is true for immigration and trade, which they will smash this coming year.

If you read the writing of the new managerial regime, they like to talk about disrupting things and overturning stuff. They seem to have an unthinking belief that salvation can only come through chaos. One way of achieving this is the subversion of truth and order, so that perspective is all that matters. We are probably going to see what that looks like when applied to a society through public policy. We may be about to experience the first instance of recursive subversion.

This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00: Opening
02:00: The Demographic Crisis
17:00: The Crime Wave
32:00: The Crisis Of Legitimacy
52:00: Housekeeping

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

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The Road Ahead

Posted on January 21, 2021 by thezman

Up until this moment in time, the vast majority of right-wing people operated from the assumption that they were in the majority. They were part of the silent majority that did not make a racket in the streets. The Left and their associated riffraff went out into the street and bellowed like lunatics because they never had the numbers. They had to be loud and intimidating in order to get their way. When they went too far, then the great silent majority would awaken and put them in their place.

They also operated under the assumption that numbers still mattered. If the majority got motivated and turned up to vote, they would win the election and that would make a difference to the politicians. Right-wing politics was all about mobilizing the voters and winning a majority. They did not have to worry about changing minds. They had to focus on getting the word out so the majority would turnout. It was the Left that focused on convincing people into going along with their schemes.

This not only applied to elections, but to all areas of politics. The expression “go woke and go broke” is rooted in the assumption that business has to respect the customer or face the wrath of the marketplace. If management takes to Twitter pushing left-wing nonsense, it was assumed they would pay for it. A television program that decided to offend its viewers would see its ratings decline. Right-wingers were the majority, and they were operating in a political marketplace.

Whether this was ever true does not matter, as it is not true now. That silent majority is now a permanent minority. Further, the political marketplace no longer exists. You are not allowed to speak your mind to your fellow citizens, unless your opinions are approved by the managerial class. They are also making sure that your choices at the ballot box will be limited to their approved options. Even if you find a way around it, the magic of mail-in ballots will guarantee the outcome in advance.

What this means is the new age of managerial authoritarianism will require a new brand of politics that fits the age. All of the avenues of the old system have been closed off or corrupted, so they serve the ends of the regime. Mass censorship monopolizes the public space by the organs of the ruling class. Systematic ballot stuffing closes off the electoral route. Even the courts are a dead end. A court that claims the Founders wanted special rights for men in drag is no friend of the people.

From the perspective of white populism, all politics must now be irregular politics as conventional politics has been closed off to us. The Right has to move away from the mindset of the majority to the mindset of the put-upon minority. That means engaging in unconventional tactics. When you cannot participate in conventional politics in order to advance your interests, your choices are clear. You either submit and live the lie that is conventional politics, or you rebel and live outside the lie.

This is why boycotting elections and threatening the Republican Party from the Right must be part of the new political toolkit. In the old politics, it was always about the people running the system, not the system itself. The focus was on getting the right people elected. In the new politics, this is reversed. It is about the system, not the people running the system. The GOP is part of that system. Attacking them is part of weakening a system that makes war on us.

This has a strategic value, as well. The Left has always looked at the Republicans, along with their enablers from Conservative Inc., as an electric fence that keeps the white majority inside the system. Attacking the GOP forces them to choose their friends on the Left over their former constituents. It reframes politics as insiders versus outsiders, rather than one group of insiders versus another, with the white majority looking on like spectators, hoping for a good result.

The hardest part of this new mindset will be the idea of being ungovernable. This is the opposite of what most right-wing people have been conditioned to think. In the old way, the good citizen plays by the rules. In the new age, the good citizen is always looking for the chance to throw sand in the gears and undermine the rules. The dissident is always looking to drive up the costs to the managerial class by making them expend resources to compel compliance with their rules.

A simple example of this is the “It’s OK To Be White” flyers that create havoc from time to time. A few dollars’ worth of material and an hour of time results in a week of left-wing handwringing and the cops wasting resources on it. Someone adding “And neither do black people” to a yard sign that reads, “Hate Has No Home Here” does real psychological damage to the managerial class. It mocks their morality and their control over public attitudes. It is activism with a very high ROI.

The main point of politics for dissidents in any sort of authoritarian society is to develop and maintain an atmosphere of pressure on the regime. As ugly as it looks, those troops, barricades and razor wire fencing in Washington are a great result. A ruling class living inside an armed camp is one that will eventually burn through its emotional capital and begin to make mistakes. Ideally, the ruling class stays behind those barriers, fearing that the people on the other side are ungovernable.

Another thing we must do is abandon solution-based politics. For generations, the white majority has been conditioned to think in terms of solutions. In this new politics, there are no solutions. There are tactics that advance the interest of dissidents, which are primarily the weakening of the regime. The solutions in the demographic age can only come after the collapse the liberal democratic order. All politics now are about creating conditions in which rational politics can return.

This raises the thorniest of problems. The late Robert Novak used to say he loved his country but hated his government. In a post-national world ruled by a dictatorship of the managerial class, there is no country to love. Patriotism, like civic nationalism and clean elections, is a museum piece. Instead, you love your cause, you love your people, and you are willing to work with anyone that helps you fight the tyrants. In a world of “us versus them”, abstract concepts like patriotism have no place..

As a practical matter politics now must be a daily rebellion. Like Havel’s green grocer, being a dissident means living in the truth and every day is a war to pull a brother out of the lie that is modern America. It is defacing signs that say we are all in this together and littering managerial areas with reminders that they are surrounded. It means denying them your virtues by refusing to cooperate and only going along with their edicts after they have expended resources to compel you.

It is to live and let them know you live in a constant state of insurrection and that as long as you do, they can never rest. The people on the other side of those barriers live in fear of the people on this side of those barriers. They can no longer trust the men guarding them, as most of those men live on this side of those barriers. They are paranoid and afraid of the noises on the other side. The politics of this age are all about turning those institutions they control into prisons.

Lesson Of Trump #3

Posted on January 20, 2021 by thezman

Note: I have a post up behind the green door on the 1997 movie The Devil’s Own, starting Brad Pitt and Harrison Ford.

Perhaps in the future, this day will be called day zero of year zero, signifying the official closing of one era and the start of a new one. The installation of Joe Biden as president marks the end of the old civic nationalist America and the beginning of the new managerial state. Competitive elections and open debate of the old era have been swept away in favor of ceremonial elections and speech codes. The managerial class has formally seized control of the country.

No one can look at what is going on in the country and think any of it is normal or that returning to normal is possible. Even if Washington wanted to return to normalcy, the last few months cannot be unseen. Joe Biden will take the oath of office behind layers of razor wire, guarded more than a full army division. The imperial capital looks like it is under occupation and it very well may remain this way. The new regime is extremely paranoid, convulsed by increasingly bizarre conspiracy theories.

This is the big lesson of the Trump years. The nature and psychology of the managerial class began to transform after the end of the Cold War. Little by little it was becoming a closed and insulated culture sitting atop of the general culture. The system looked the same from the outside, two parties competing for votes and the right to dispense the benefits of power, but inside it was changing. It was becoming a distinct culture and the people in that culture were becoming class aware.

Viewed in this context, the 2016 election of Donald Trump was the catalyst for the final phase of this process, the end of which is unfolding now. The political system in America is now a closed shop, like a sports league. Just as you cannot buy a sports team without first being approved by the other owners, you can no longer win a federal election without first being vetted by the managerial class. The razor wire barriers are the manifestation of this closing of the managerial elite.

It is not just the political marketplace that has been closed off. America is no longer a market economy. This is another thing that has accelerated into plain sight during the Trump years. The shuttering of the social media site Parler is a great example of how the marketplace no longer exists in a conventional sense. All of its vendors gave up their business with the company, because the people running those firms are loyal to their class, not the abstract principles of the marketplace.

This will become increasingly clear as the new regime takes control. The big economic players like the banks or the tech giants are no longer subject to the marketplace in any meaningful way. For example, if angry consumers swore off Amazon, not much would change for Amazon as they control the logistics for the companies those angry consumers would use in place of Amazon. Mastercard can black list anyone because they are a part of a cartel that has no competition.

This will be the hardest lesson for people to accept. Every generation of Americans walking the earth right now has been conditioned to believe the marketplace is the final arbiter of all disputes. Despite all that has gone on, most people cannot accept that there is no marketplace in large swaths of the economy. They still respond to the bogeyman of socialism, despite the fact America has been a socialist country for close to a century now. We are now a command-and-control economy.

Of course, all of this is coming with something even more ominous. For example, the tech giants volunteered to work with the FBI to get the protestors they have now labeled insurrectionists, which is an important change in tone. This public-private partnership comes naturally, as the people involved see one another as members of the same class, at war with the same enemy. Silicon Valley is officially the signal intelligence arm of the surveillance state.

This year the regime will roll out the Covid passports, which will be required to get on public transport. Soon, they will be required to do anything. This is the beginning of the social credit system, where your internal passport is essentially a report card that is constantly updated based on your behavior. It starts with public health but will quickly moves to public safety. Surveillance capitalism will come into full bloom tarted up with the language of public safety and defending democracy.

In total, what the Trump phenomenon has revealed is the America most people thought was their country is gone. Politically, economically, demographically, and culturally, the old American has been replaced with this new society. The great reset, as the new regime bills it, is a dictatorship of the managerial class. That class is now largely closed off to the rest of us. Just as the nomenklatura had the house on the embankment, the managerial class has the walled institutions.

This is why the new regime is willing to bust up many of the institutions that had been instrumental in creating. Public distrust of the media is no longer important, as the new class is no longer subject to the voters. The media companies no longer worry about the audience, because what are you going to do, start your own Amazon? Create your own Hollywood? Mitch McConnell supports another impeachment, because he knows the party system is a farce. His loyalty to his class is what matters.

Michael Anton was right that Donald Trump was the Flight 93 president. Like that flight, the story was motivated by hope, but it was doomed from the start. Like that flight, it crashed and now can only serve as a warning and a rally point. For the new regime, it is a warning that their subjects will fight back if given the chance. For the rest of us, it is reminder that we can fight back, but success is not guaranteed. Resistance only works when no one has any illusions about what is being resisted.

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Monthly Archives: January 2021