Revolt In The Synopticon

Posted on February 16, 2021 by thezman

Revolt in a normal human society is made easier by the fact that everyone knows who is in charge and the institutions they control. In a despotism, the name of the despot and his supporters is known. The institutions they control and their relative power is also well known. The same is true of a republic when it degrades into oligarchy. Picking sides comes naturally. In the synopticon, this is not so clear, because everyone is an agent of the system, a potential threat to anyone resisting the system.

That is the first thing a political dissident living within the modern liberal democracy must accept about their condition. Since everyone operates within a lattice work of interconnected data collection nodes, the sides are not clear. The people at the top, ostensibly running the system, rarely act directly. They often appear to be carried along by the system itself. Groups that form up to reform some aspect of the system are easily coopted by the system to defend the system from change.

This is the hardest thing to grasp about any human relations. Half the population will also seek to assign blame to an individual or group of individuals. They simply lack the capacity to understand how events, ideas, and the system in which they operate can come together within a society. They insist the problem is someone holding office or a group of people running an institution or party. While not entirely wrong, it is an antiquated view of the world that make resistance self-defeating.

The simplest way of thinking of this is the modern prison. The guards rely on cameras, listening devices and other detection systems. They also rely on snitches in the prison population to tip them off to trouble. Ideally, the prison system wants every prisoner distrusting every other prisoner. If they are unable and unwilling to cooperate, then they are just a collection of rebellious individuals. No matter how clever one may be, the rest are there to undermine the effort due to misplaced self-interest.

In a society in which everyone watches everyone, knowingly or otherwise, and inanimate objects like ATM’s and mobile phones can be turned into snitches for the system, the people are isolated individuals suspended in the system. The unaware are happily holding up their mobile devices, snitching for the system at every event, while the aware are doing the same, thinking they are fighting the man. This is why the most powerful people think they are the resistance, fighting populism.

This is the first rule of revolution within the synopticon. The war is not against people, but against the system itself. The people involved may be bad actors, but even the people who appear to be good actors, can be bad actors, because they fail to grasp that they are part of the system. This is something the cleverer inmates figure out about the prison system. In order to have any sense of freedom, they continually throw sand in the gears of the system and encourages others to do the same.

As a practical matter, this first means disconnecting as much as possible from the information grid. This is not easy, as it so much of it is convenient. That mobile device feels necessary, because it is convenient. Using Apple Pay or a credit card for all purchases is easy. It is also easy for the authorities to track you down if you show up at the wrong political event or hang around the wrong people. The people at the Capitol on January 6 are learning this lesson the hard way.

This is the first step for any political actor. Politics and the normal aspects of life must be separate spheres, physically and mentally. This means political events are mobile device free. Communication is through the densest channel possible. Reading texts is simple for the system. Reading e-mail is hard. Reading lips through CCTV cameras is impossible, despite what the movies claim. Never write when you can speak, never speak when you can nod. That is the way of dissent in the synopticon.

There is another lesson from the criminal world that applies here. The reformer in the synopticon is always policing his area for nodes of the system. In the criminal sphere, this means listening devices and snitches. The smart actor is always testing the people and environment for security risks. For reformers, this means imposing rules on others about their interaction with the system. It means developing codes of conduct to enforce discipline about communications and interaction with the system.

As a practical matter, this means political resistance starts with community. Entrance into the community requires increasing levels of commitment. At the periphery are people who always being evaluated to see if they can be an asset to the political community and perhaps one day join it. As they demonstrate their worth and commitment, they are required to make greater sacrifices for the whole in order to go deeper into the heart of the community.

In other words, organizing in the synopticon must operate within the blind spots of the system, which in the digital age means the analog space. While the system can detect and predict community formation, it needs the inputs through the compound eye of the system to form the data set. The invisible rules of a community operating face to face are outside the vision of the system. The most dangerous thing to the synopticon is small groups of people meeting in person to form bonds.

Finally, the reformer in the synopticon must embrace the Gerasimov Doctrine. This is the Russian approach to modern war and politics. The days of nations facing off across a field in a well-define set-piece battle are long gone. War and politics have converged in the information age. Those color revolutions sponsored by American intelligence are good examples of modern war. The appearance of “little green men” in Crimea during the American overthrow of the Ukrainian government is another.

Domestically, this means something like systemic sabotage. The more bad data fed into the system, the less valuable the information it creates. The less valuable the information to the people relying on it, the less likely they are to trust it. In the information age, war is an information war. Jamming the system with bogus data is one front on that war. Similarly, causing unnecessary responses from the system wastes resources that could be used elsewhere.

This is why leafletting, for example, is a powerful weapon. It is cheap for the one side, but expensive for the system. Police departments running around looking for the person behind a leafletting campaign is a drain on the system. It also erodes the trust between the people reliant on the system and the system itself. The same would be true of sit-ins and candlelight vigils outside the green zone in Washington. It would turn one weapon of the color revolution against the people wielding it.

Another example of how a multifront war against the compound eye of the synopticon is the short squeeze ushered in by retail investors. The people reliant on the system assumed the other side was operating from predictable motives. When it turned out to be otherwise, they had no rational response. Suddenly, the financial class has a new front in their war on the middle-class. Do this a dozen times and the system is a giant swatting at flies.

This is the essence of the Gerasimov Doctrine. War in the information age is multidimensional and, irregular and ad-hoc. It is not about locating the enemy and engaging him in battle. The enemy is all around in the form of the system. This is particularly true for the reformer. Revolt in the synopticon is about hacking that system so it becomes unpredictable and unreliable. This means jamming it with bad data, depriving it of useful data and overloading it at its weak points.

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Social War In The Synopticon

Posted on February 15, 2021 by thezman

Note: The regular Monday post Taki post is up. This week is a look at the vulgar circus we call Washington and the carny trash running it. There’s also some new content up behind the green door. This week I review the 1951 classic, A Place In The Sun.

When one takes a look at what is happening in the West, particularly the English speaking nations, the first thing to notice is the lack of vocabulary. Is this a civil war we are seeing or is it just cultural unrest? How should the sides be labeled? The people in charge of the institutions call themselves the resistance and their declared enemies are people devoid of any power, beyond numbers. Those people call themselves the silent majority, despite not being silent or a majority.

Just as the labels make little sense, the comparisons to fictional and historical examples do not hold up either. Is what we are experiencing like Orwell’s 1984? Not in any meaningful way. It may be closer to Huxley’s Brave New World, but our managerial class is nothing like the World State, in terms of intelligence and purpose. There is no Mustafa Mond in our ruling class. Similarly, the comparisons to authoritarian states of the past are nothing more than superficial.

While there is nothing new in this age with regards to the human condition and human relations, we live in a new age. Technological progress brought about by the microprocessor is changing the nature of human society. While Orwell could imagine a world where everyone is watched by the state, he could not imagine a world where everyone is watched by everyone. Huxley could imagine a highly ordered society controlled by a few; he could not imagine artificial intelligence.

That is the first bit of language that needs defining. The panopticon is a concept most know, as it is a trope in many movies. This is the world where a few watches the many, like in a prison. The guards use cameras, search lights and electronic detection devices to monitor the prisoners. The idea behind it is that the prisoners never really know if they are being watched at any moment, but they know that they could be watched at any moment, no matter where they are in the system.

America is now a synopticon. This is a term coined by Norwegian sociologist Thomas Mathiesen to describe a society in which the few are watched by many. While the panopticon is a one-to-many relationship, with the one being the controlling authority, the synopticon is a many-to-many relationship. Any one person can be watched by many, but also part of the many watching another. It is a world where everyone is an input devise, feeding what they hear and see into the system.

This is an important concept. It is a system. The people holding up their mobile phones and posting the results to their social media page are not operating as conscious agents of the state or any particular interest. They are just nodes on the system. The same is true of the various devices deployed to monitor behavior. The people installing them may have a reason, but that reason exists within the system itself. That surveillance video posted to the cloud is consumed by the synopticon as data.

Take a second to consider how many eyes are on you at any moment. If you own a modern automobile, it is tracking and reporting your driving habits. Your phone, of course, is tracking your whereabouts and the people you meet. CCTV cameras silently record your activity. Your web browser tracks your reading habits. The smart TV monitors your viewing habits. If you have one of the security devices or a smart home device, it is keeping tabs on you inside your home.

If you wanted to get a visual image of what your life is like in the synopticon, imagine a world where everyone is naked, lives in glass houses and can see that everyone is looking at everyone else. Now, imagine yourself observing that world and noticing that everyone is sure they are not, in fact, naked, living in a glass house and being watched all the time. In the panopticon, everyone knows they are being watched and by whom, but in the synopticon, people sense it, but do not see it.

Unlike the panopticon, where humans are looking for unacceptable behavior, in the synopticon the system does this on its own. For example, the system can examine the data coming in to model communities within society. Community detection algorithms can discover relationships within the complex nature of human societies. Further, it can begin to model those communities and predict behavior of the community, as well as the members of that community, from the data stream.

If you are at the top of the synopticon, this is useful technology as it allows you to reverse engineer social behavior that you wish to suppress. The vast database of human activity that is the synopticon can be used to analyze and understand the attachment members of a subculture have to one another. What commitment level exists among and between members. The value system that holds the group together and how it shapes their activity. This is called Social Bond Theory.

Another key concept to this new world is the social war. In agrarian and industrial societies, civil unrest leads to civil war or possibly revolution. A civil war is when factions within the elite draft the population into their dispute. A revolution is when a new elite rises up outside the old elite and attempts to overthrow them. A social war is one in which all participant groups can be at war with one another, but also in league with one another, for reasons they do not necessarily understand.

An example of this in the modern age is the Antifa phenomenon. They claim to be the heirs of Marxist anti-fascists, but they are not Marxists. They have no coherent ideology, beyond a juvenile form of anarchism. Their opposition is equally ephemeral, as there are no actual fascists in this age. Similarly, their sponsors are in a constant state of agitation, despite control of the institutions. The more they seem to control, the less control they feel they have and the greater their agitation.

What we are experiencing is a social war. Everyone in the system sense they are losing control of the social code that shapes behavior. They seek to regain control of that social code through the conventional means, but winning and losing those fights has no impact on their control of the culture. The imposition of bizarre new moral codes by the elite, for example, are a reaction to their sense of powerlessness. The growing bourgeois radicalism is also a reaction to the perceived loss of control.

That is the key here. A civil war is about control of the state. A revolution is about the same thing, with the added aspect of ideological conflict. A social war is about control of the social code, the invisible set of rules that govern human behavior. As the synopticon takes greater control of that code, the people inside find themselves at war with an invisible enemy, the system itself. This manifests as something like prison gang fights, where frustrations are directed at the visible, rather than the system.

The evolution of the synopticon appears to be a process, perhaps a runaway process, that has escaped the control of the creator. As the friction within society increases, as people are increasingly constrained by the social control systems, the synopticon evolves greater control. Modern society is looking like a boiling pot. The more it boils, the tighter the lid is drawn down. Inside, the increasingly aggressive and antagonistic conflict is causing the pot to boil more violently.

This is where we are now. It is not a Hobbesian war of all against all, but rather an increasing friction between members of society. This friction arises from their increasingly confined social space. It turns out that the old axiom about familiarity breeding contempt is true. Instead of a society becoming more cooperative as it becomes more integrated, it is becoming increasingly hostile. Meanwhile, the synopticon jams us all closer together, in all our hostile ugliness.

Deep Thoughts

Posted on February 12, 2021 by thezman

This is always a funny time of year. There is the long run up to the holidays that starts in November and concludes in January. In election years you have that as an added bit of excitement. Then it all comes to an end in January, the dead of winter for most of the country, and people go on a bit of break. This year the denouement came a bit late due to the fake election and fake inauguration. The entirely peaceful excitement around the fake inauguration was an added bonus to the season.

Now, we are in the dead of winter. You can see it on the streets in the parts of the country that have winter. Here in Lagos, the streets look like peak lockdown all of a sudden, in that there are few cars out during the day. It has been snowing here a bit and the schools remain closed, but it is extra quiet now. Who knows what the people are doing when not out on the roads, but the people in charge assure us everything is under control and we are all in this together. Trust science.

This dead spot in the calendar has always shown up on-line, as well. The slowest traffic month every year is February, January is pretty slow too. March is always the busiest as people seem to come back to life as we head into spring. Humans are still hardwired to the natural rhythms of our environment. Spring is the busiest time on the site, then things slack off a bit for summer, as people get out and live. It ticks up for the autumnal excitement, especially if there is an election.

This being that dull spot in the calendar, this week the show is about some more contemplative topics. One of the things that is striking is just how open the new ruling regime is about their hatred of white people. Those over the age of fifty, maybe over forty, remember when such talk was used as satire. It was ridiculous to think that white people would be treated like second class citizens. Here we are though, and most people are still struggling to process it.

Of course, the people on the other side of this transaction remain a mystery to the sorts of people attracted to right-wing politics. Right-wing people try to understand the partisan mind in the same way they understand the normal mind. They start with the assumption that the partisan is motivated by self-interest. The trouble is the partisan interprets self-interest to mean their cause. Everything they are is defined by their membership in the cause. It transcends everything, even their life.

It is a good time to think about all this stuff. The Pretender is staggering around drawing smiley faces on executive orders written by his staff. The media is waging war on imaginary insurrectionist. The health Nazis continue to play make believe over the coronavirus stuff. Otherwise, not a lot going on, so the show this week is about some of those topics. Since these topics require a little more thought and analysis than a new story, just three topics this week.

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: Our New Identity (Link) (Link) (Link) (Link)
22:00: The Fascist Coup (Link)
42:00: The Partisan Mind (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/9jF6UjQzx8w

Let’s Go Backwards

Posted on February 11, 2021 by thezman

Most people on this side of the great divide have concluded that the time for fixing what is broken in America has passed. The historical processes that have been unleashed by past error will just have to run their course. What comes after will be whatever the winners of the great struggle create. What if that is not true and there is a window to stop this process? What things could we do to break this cycle of madness that seems to have gripped the American empire?

One thing that should be done right away for no other reason than to slow things down is shutting off the mobile phone system. Humans evolved to interact with one another in person, not through the virtual reality of the mobile device. Everywhere you go you see people walking around like zombies, glued to their phone. It is like the drug soma from the novel Brave New World. The difference is this drug puts people into a trance in which their senses are bombarded with data that irritate them.

One reason we have become an outrage culture is outrage is the only way to get attention from others. In a world where people are linked to a constant stream of images and bursts of text, getting noticed means being outlandish of outrageous within those data streams. On the other hand, being glued to the data stream leaves little room for real human interaction and even less room for real emotion. Large swaths of the population only feel human when they are outraged by the stream.

This would not be as difficult to do as you might think. The rulers could impose a dollar per minute tax on the service. Sure, the wireless firms would fight it, but the government has tanks and men with guns. Shoot enough wireless executives and the rest either run away or fall in line. The firm slap of authority is best conveyed against the wall of the prison, after a quick trial. It was not that long ago when mobile charges were prohibitive and very few people could afford a mobile phone.

Similarly, the big social media platforms have become a problem. They are nothing more than cauldrons of human misery now. Again, it was not so long ago when these platforms did not exist. If we got rid of Facebook and Twitter, the world does not change in any important ways. People would simply migrate back to small private groups on-line or go outside again. Turning off the big social platforms would have an immediate positive impact on the psyche of the public.

Shutting these down would be easier than limiting the mobile device. Enforcement of Section 230 along with new privacy laws that prohibit them from harvesting your activity on-line would shut them down in weeks. Once they are subject to the same laws as everyone else and they cannot steal from their users, their business model would collapse in a hurry. Small platforms would still exist, but as labors of love or as small businesses run by one or two people with a narrow interest.

Another rollback would have to be the cameras. If you are out in public and have a heart attack or you are attacked by a criminal, people pull out their phones and begin taking pics of your suffering. They rather hope you die so they can get a video that will go viral. Combined with the cameras put up by the government and business, all of us now live in a synopticon. This is a world where all of us are individually monitored by all of us, a mass of camera wielding ghouls.

The solution here is your image is yours and you own it. Anyone possessing your image or distributing your image without your express permission is no different than someone trafficking in stolen goods. If someone wants to post your bad day on-line, they need your permission. The platform hosting it needs your permission. Otherwise, they are liable for possessing your property without your permission. This would also apply to security cameras. They can be used only in a courtroom.

This is not a novel concept. Many states still have laws on the books, for example, against filming a public road. Movie companies used to need permission to use video of people walking down a street. Your image used to be your property. A big part of what ails us is we have allowed the ownership of your information to fall into the public domain. Everywhere you go someone is taking pictures of you and you have no control over what they do with those images.

What is being proposed here, in effect, is rolling back the last 25 years of technological and economic change that no one contemplated, debated, or voted on. This all just evolved quickly before anyone could contemplate the impact. A generation long real-world experiment has proven it was a bad idea. We have created a world of outraged shut-ins and snitches. The only thing everyone agrees upon is that everyone hates the world they experience, either in reality or through their device.

Would people riot in the streets if their phones suddenly became useful only in emergencies as a way to call for help? Would there be protest marches over the loss of Facebook and YouTube? Would Zoomers begin forming militias when they can no longer video every moment of their life with their phone? Obviously not, as these things did not happen over Covid. In fact, people would adapt and maybe regrow the backbone and spirit needed to protest such things.

The Ride Never Ends

Posted on February 10, 2021 by thezman

The reboot of last year’s big political flop, otherwise known as Trump Impeachment, hit the big stage in DC this week. The Senate kicked off the show with a debate about the constitutionality of the whole thing. The old rule of vaudeville was that you start every show with some jokes to warm up the audience. It is good to see Washington bringing back the old traditions for their political dramas. To the shock of no one, the Senate voted in favor of the claim that this nonsense is constitutional.

The one thing missing from this reboot is the boggle-eyed lunatic who was the master of ceremonies for the first one. Adam Schiff is sitting this out. There is some debate about whether having a paranoid schizophrenic be the star of the show was the reason the first try at this was an embarrassing flop. They also had the fat guy who poos himself in public as the co-star. The whole thing turned into a poorly made version of Dumb and Dumber, which is a problem when you are putting on a drama.

The early reviews say this reboot is looking like the high school version of an old Broadway musical. The writing is good, but the people playing the roles are far too small for the costumes they are wearing. Even without Trump looming over it as a reminder that our politics have long ago descended into farce, the idea of impeaching a man who is out of office is too much to overcome. The public is mostly ignoring it, despite the month long hype about the imaginary insurrection.

Like so much the shadowy cabal that runs this place has done over the last several years, this stunt just serves to undermine the system they operate. In a world where massive election irregularities are ignored and dismissed by the politicians, it is tough to take those same politicians seriously when they bang on about their democracy or imaginary threats to it. If they were really worried about their democracy, maybe they would do something about the voting system.

What this looks like is theater for the people inside the wire so they can be reminded there is a wire, and it must be maintained. The green zone they have erected for themselves is not simply an overreaction. It is a symbol of the spiritual and cultural divide between the people running this place and the rest of us. The hive minded have now created a physical manifestation of their world view. From now on, people inside will be made to show they are loyal to inside, not outside.

Putting that aside, the thumbless people behind this farce are creating a new set of problems for themselves with this. American politics has always been a game of bad cop worse cop. One side tells 20% of white people they will push through some nation wrecking scheme, while the other side tells 40% of white people that they will not roll back the last nation wrecking scheme, but they will stop this one. This has kept white people engaged in a process that has slowly dispossessed them.

The rigged election and the response to it broke this system. Despite the Republicans pulling all the usual tricks in an effort to scare their voters in Georgia during the special election, many of those voters stayed home. The old gags did not work, because the election put the lie to those old gags. Impeachment promises to hammer home this point to tens of millions of white people. One party hates them, and the other party really hates them. They do not have a voice in this system.

We have already seen some Republican Senators shed their skin suits, revealing their scaly natural exterior. Six of them slithered over to the other side, coiling around the legs of their master, to vote in favor of this farce. You can be sure they will be voting to convict when the time comes. Conventional wisdom says the Senate will not get the votes to convict, but given the state of things, that is not a good bet. The GOP would love to be rid of Trump forever and this is how they do it.

If you assume that a third of the GOP senators hate Trump and his voters, that is roughly 15 votes right there. Then you have the deluded members who think they can inherit that vote if Trump is forced off the stage. They think their kinder gentler populism will win the day. Then there are those who are taking bribes. The level of corruption in Washington is such that we have to assume all of them are on the pad. Maybe the ChiComs tell them to support a conviction.

Either way, the whole thing will most likely further undermine the Republicans as the security fence for the Democrats. This is very bad for the political class, as it further reinforces the notion that there are now two sides. Those inside the razor wire green zone and those outside it. Given the general cluelessness of the people running both parties, this is a very dangerous environment for them. They need to people trusting in the system, even if they do not trust the people running the system.

There is one interesting side story to this. Trump put up a solid defense of himself in the first impeachment circus. He hired competent lawyers and treated the whole thing with far more respect than it deserved. This time he has hired a B-team that is more concerned with melodrama than the process. It may be that Trump would welcome a conviction and disqualification. This lets him go back to being a gassy blowhard on-line, without having to deliver any of the things he promises.

Another bit of subplot here is that the larger show that was the “great fortifying of our democracy”, which looked a lot like coup, is coming to a close. This is the last bit of the drama the new regime can use to distract from reality. That reality is they own the mess they created in their effort to overthrow the system. The crumbling economy, the Covid fiasco, the bloated financial system, all of it. They will not have Trump to kick around anymore, so they will own what comes next. Good luck with that.

Who’s To Blame?

Posted on February 9, 2021 by thezman

Note: The plugin I use for commenting broke for some unknown reason yesterday, which is why the comments disappeared. I disabled it so the default comment system is now running. it’s not great, but until the plugin is fixed, it will do.

Over the holidays, the great Jared Taylor was on one of the many live streams that pop up during the that time. He was asked if as a Southerner, he found some pleasure in seeing the statue toppling mobs now turning on statues of Lincoln. The irony of nonwhites going after Lincoln as a white supremacist is hard to miss. Taylor demurred, saying something along the lines that he abhorred any attacks on whites or white history, even if the person in question made war on his ancestors.

It was an interesting answer as it touches on the central problem of the current crisis we see playing out in America. Who’s to blame for it? The basic starting point of problem solving is to identify the problem and then identify the cause. When the mortgage market fell apart a decade ago, people blamed the bankers. Some people blamed the credit agencies or the regulators. There was plenty of blame to go around, so lots of people were blamed, but no one was punished.

In the case of the ongoing pogroms against white people, there is not much talk about who is responsible for it. Part of that is due to the prohibitions against white people talking about being white. One of the great ironies of this crisis is that the media is filled with invective about white people, but you will never see a white person start a sentence with “as a white person.” Whiteness is a thing that is only allowed to be a hobgoblin in the minds and mouths of the anti-whites.

Getting back to the Taylor example, he cannot laugh at the mob turning on Lincoln, because Lincoln was white, but that would apply to the mob as well. If the people doing the toppling are white, then the Taylor rule prevents a pro-white partisan from blaming them for it. An inescapable fact of the current crisis is the people leading the anti-white pogrom are often white or white presenting. Giving white people a pass on partisan grounds creates a problem when trying to assign blame.

This is why the anti-white pogroms have met so little resistance thus far. On the one hand you have the taboo against white people taking their own side. On the other hand, you have the face of the anti-white program being white or white presenting. If all of the anti-whites were black, then the problem of assigning blame would be simpler, but the leading anti-whites are almost always a pale face. The chief racketeer in the grievance rackets is a white woman named Robin DiAngelo.

The attacks on white people are just one example. The financialization of the economy starting in the 1980’s has created a massive wealth disparity. America now has an invisible over-class that owns almost all of the wealth. What they do not own directly, they control through what amounts to regulatory capture. They control the institutions that set the rules on how you can use your property. Inevitably, those rules favor the greed heads that control the financial system.

How did this happen? Who is responsible for it? Conservative will say that you cannot blame capitalism or free markets. Just like the taboo against whites taking their own side, they enforce a taboo against questioning the current economic order. Similarly, you cannot blame rich people, as that’s class warfare. If you do not like the rich people running things, get rich and challenge them. It is a version of build a better mousetrap so the world will beat a path to your door.

The Left side of the political class has an answer. They say the reason for the massive wealth disparity is white privilege and systemic racism. They focus on the white and white presenting faces running the corporations. This is a dangerous game for obvious reasons, so it is deliberately made absurd. The result, however, is white people are left with two choices when wondering who is to blame for this. They can either blame themselves or celebrate their dispossession.

This shape shifting that prevents the people from identifying the cause of the problems that plague their society is the result of democracy. When everyone has a vote, either in an election or in the economy, then everyone is to blame for the result. Don’t like woke capital? Don’t buy from it. Don’t like woke government? Don’t vote for it. The fact that no one actually voted for it or demanded it makes no difference. The blame for every problem is the imaginary neighbor who is demanding it.

This is one reason for the increasing unhappiness. It is not just the problems people can see all around them. It is the fact that there is no acceptable cause. People are left to blame themselves and their neighbors. If everyone is to blame, then everyone is the problem and everyone is in a war with everyone. The democratization of a society means the democratizing of blame. Self-hatred and self-loathing become the creed of the majority, with only the minorities are able to find a suitable enemy.

This is an unnatural condition as people are naturally inclined to find the source of their unhappiness and make that the focus of their anger. Eric Hoffer noted that “mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.” Get enough angry people together with the raw material for a shared identity and they will find their devil. This is what makes being in the ruling class a dangerous game right now. It is why they are stacking the sandbags so high.

This is usually where the conservative pops back in and says it is wrong to pin the blame on people when the problem is systemic. The thing is though, the people at the top of any society have a duty to the system that creates them. They are the stewards of the system. The ruling elite of our liberal democracy are responsible for economic and cultural troubles underlying the current crisis. It is their failure to do their duty as a ruling elite that has led us to this point. They are to blame.

The Black And Reds

Posted on February 8, 2021 by thezman

Note: The Monday Taki piece is up and the topic is the moral dimension to the ongoing social war. There are a few new items up behind the green door as well.

The “Black and Tans” were a police force recruited by the British into the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) as something like a paramilitary force or a militia during the Irish War of Independence. The majority were unemployed former soldiers who fought in the Great War, but many were criminals and even prisoners. They got their nickname from the uniforms they wore. They were supposed to help the overstretched RIC maintain order and deal with the Irish Republican Army.

In reality, they were something like a mob of thugs unleashed on the Irish population as a form of state sponsored terrorism. While most had military training, there was no code of conduct to control their actions. They were known for their brutal tactics and their indiscriminate attacks on civilians in retaliation for IRA attacks on them. Because the men recruited into the ranks were young and had few prospects at home, they were happy to do whatever was asked to the Irish population.

This is a useful historical example to keep in mind when reading this Time article on how the oligarchs rigged the 2020 election. Most people have fixated on the audacity of posting such a piece. Usually, people who commit crimes try to conceal their actions, but in this case, the principles are willing to boast about it. We are in the midst of a great purge of our institutions of anyone who questions the legitimacy of the election and here we have these people confirming many of the claims.

The motivation behind writing that piece is spite, of course. The half-hearted talk of bringing unity after the election has not fooled many people. That Time piece makes clear that there can be no unity, because there will be no peace. As the article says, the point of rigging the election was to “fortify” what they call democracy, but which the rest of us call their permanent rule. They were prepared to use any means necessary to defend their rights and privileges from the people.

One of those tactics, of course, was the unleashing of mobs onto the public starting with the highly orchestrated George Floyd incident. This was a combination of Black Lives Matter, created by the Obama administration during his second term, and ANTIFA, created and funded by the Soros organization. One group allegedly represents the interest of blacks, while the other group claims to be the inheritors of the communist revolutionary spirit. It was blacks and reds.

This is the truly remarkable aspect of that post. For months, the evidence piled up suggesting the mobs were manufactured. There seemed to be someone or a group of people funding and directing them. Early in the Time story, it boasts “In a way, Trump was right. There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans.”

In other words, the suspicions were correct. The left-wing terror networks that operate out of not-for-profits like Pro Publica and The Bail Project, funneled cash, supplies and instructions to the mobs on the streets. That cash came from the CEO’s and their money changers in Washington, Silicon Valley and New York. This money was offered in exchange for violent street actions intended to either provoke a right-wing reaction or embarrass the Trump administration.

This sounds a lot like what the British did in Ireland. Unable to win popular support in their crusade against Trump, they unleashed thugs with official protection to terrorize the population. State sponsored terror is a well-known tactic to control a population, but it is generally considered the bane of civilized government. This is the sort of thing you expect from authoritarian societies or occupied ones. It was something the Bolsheviks did after the revolution, which is ironic given the people involved.

A century ago, the Irish Republican Army figured out that winning the hearts and minds of the people made British occupation expensive. When the British could not recruit Irish into the police force, they brought in the thugs that became known as the Black and Tans. These thugs only made it easier for the IRA to win the public over to the cause and the IRA was quick to take advantage of it. Eventually, the British had no choice but to abandon the tactic and disband the unit.

Here in modern America, the situation is different, at least for now, so the Black and Reds are seen as effective. They have not been officially disbanded by the ruling regime, even if they have been sidelined. Recently, Antifa turned up in Washington, harassing diners and fighting with the police. They will no doubt be out this summer causing trouble along with Black Lives Matter. Unlike the Black and Tans, they have not been promised pensions or positions in the government.

Even so, it is a useful comparison. The British unleashed the Black and Tans because they did not see the Irish as humans. They were a population that had to be controlled, like wild animals or maybe prisoners. The people on the other side of the razor wire and in the bunkered communities of Silicon Valley and Wall Street look at the rest of us, especially the white population, the same way. We are no longer humans, so they are free to do as they like in order to control us.

The lesson is that in a social war, every event must be used to rally support for your side and put the other side in a bad light. The Black and Tans undermined the British position with both the Irish and British public, because the IRA made them the face of the British occupation. That is what must happen here. These mobs must be closely tied to the CEO’s and politicians directing them. The Biden presidency must be known as the Antifa presidency. Make them own their golem.

Media Man

Posted on February 7, 2021 by thezman

There are many things that one can point to in the current age as the cause of what we are experiencing. Social crisis is always the result of many factors. There is never one single cause. Even so, examining the individual causes has some utility. It helps provide a little sanity for those living through it. If nothing else, it is like the band playing on the Titanic in that if provides those who are condemned to live through the crisis with a bit of dignity as they sink into the abyss.

Anyway, one of the things that has made modern life such a mess is the vast chorus of nitwits who fill our lives with their voices. They repeat whatever has been placed in their hymnals by people with agendas. One person says something that gets them some attention and then everyone repeats it. The thing is, these people position themselves as authorities on various topics, so when they repeat what they hear, they inevitably lend authority to it. The fact is, they know not what they say.

A good example is this post at the ironically named American Conservative. The post is the generic libertarian boilerplate about the creative destruction and how this means retail will go the way of the buggy whip. In this case, the writer argues that GameStop, the company at the heart of the short squeeze initiated by a gang of retail investors, is a dead company that has no future. He thinks the run up in their shares was due to nostalgia for a bygone era of retail.

The post is complete nonsense, but it is popular nonsense repeated by these sorts of people on many different platforms. In this case, the writer is Addison Del Mastro and he is, according to his bio, the assistant editor and social media manager of The American Conservative. He is a graduate of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy and writes on urbanism, place, and popular and cultural history. According to his resume, he has never worked in the private sector.

That last bit is typical. Few people in any type of media job have ever worked in the dreaded private sector. Mr. Del Mastro is probably a great guy who does a bang-up job as the social media manager, but he is wholly unqualified to have an opinion on this topic or anything related to it. Maybe he can offer an informed opinion about the social media aspect, but otherwise, the cleaning lady at American Conservative is better qualified to discuss business and finance.

The great conservative philosopher Joseph de Maistre observed that “False opinions are like false money, struck first of all by guilty men and thereafter circulated by honest people who perpetuate the crime without knowing what they are doing.” This is exactly what we see with the mass media. The public square is flooded with the sound of the ignorant repeating falsehoods they heard from one another. It is a cacophony of half-truths, distortions and outright lies repeated by the unqualified.

The fact is, if you want to understand the GameStop story, you need to know a little about finance and have some experience as a day trader. You should also know how to read a financial statement. At the minimum, that lets you examine the facts and sort the truth from the fiction. Unless you are inside the group that pushed the stock or on the other end of it, you know you are only getting some of the story. That would be the basis for good media analysis or responsible commentary on the story.

That sort of humility is not what we get from managerial man, the type of person who takes up space in the media. Knowing practical things like how to read an income statement is for prols. The managerial man does not have time for that. That is why the media is stocked to the gills with people who know nothing. They spent all of their time accumulating esoteric credentials that they can wear as moral signifiers. These impress the other managerial types. The result is a class of know-nothings.

This is not a new phenomenon. Last year First Things published an interesting article on the Russian intelligentsia prior to and during the revolution. The intelligent was a member of the intelligentsia. Unlike an intellectual, who is a curious and educated person, the intelligent was its opposite. The art of not knowing practical things was a big part of the life of a Russian intelligent. They took pride in not having practical skills or having a useful occupation.

This is close to what we see with managerial man. At all levels, even those who see themselves as critics, they have made sure to never learn anything useful. At the bottom layer, where the media exists, the result is a vast collection of chattering skulls with no useful knowledge of their own. Above them is a vast army of people with no idea how anything works. They crash about from crisis to crisis, hoping the big machine they inherited rights itself before something bad happens.

The remarkable thing about the media is their confidence. These people repeat things with total conviction and certainty. They don’t seem to notice that they are just channeling what they heard from other chattering skulls or what was fed to them by people with an obvious agenda. These hyper-confident morons fill the public space with whatever idiotic thing they heard last. The result is we are inundated by the blather of people who have turned ignorance into a virtue.

The thing that has prevented our ruling class from bringing the roof down on all of us is the system they inherited was very strong. It evolved over many generations of struggle by a competent people with a good foundation. But even the toughest structure will eventually succumb to the wrecking ball of incompetency. Eventually, the collection of jabbering airheads we see in charge of society will push the wrong combination of buttons the end times are upon us.

Rambling Man Vol 2

Posted on February 5, 2021 by thezman

One of the weird parts of the mass media age is the constant bombardment from the firehose of mass media warps our sense of time. The Pretender Biden was installed just a couple of weeks ago, but it feels like a long time ago. It always feels like so much is happening in the moment, that what happened in the prior moment has tp be stashed in long term memory. Just as you are processing one bizarre thing from the ruling class, they are firing the next bizarre action at us.

It is a relentless succession of events, one more stranger than the next. The most powerful tool of managerial authoritarianism is constant disruption. The thing is, it is not a deliberate strategy. They are not sitting around thinking about what loony thing they can do next to create disruption. They have a need for the constant crisis. They need to feel as if life is on the knife edge at all times. it one result of the feminization of the managerial class. It is endless drama.

Still, when you take a break from the firehose and assess things, it is striking just how bizarre the word is all of a sudden. Collapse of any sort is like a man falling down a very long flight of stairs. From the top, it is a quick tumble then a long landing. That landing runs out of road and another stumble down some stairs to another landing and the process keeps repeating. You can add in a brief ascent back up to a previous landing, if you like, to account for those periods of reform and renewal.

The bizarreness comes from the lack of self-awareness. The people hiding behind the razor wire green zone in Washington never think about how this looks to the hundreds of millions on the other side. They don’t even consider it. They are like fireflies in a jar, obsessed with blinking at one another. They are oblivious to how it looks to those outside, because they are oblivious to the idea of an outside. This is probably the most remarkable change in the last few decades.

Still, the spectacle is incredible. We live in an age when a Puerto Rican barmaid and a bald black woman with the IQ of a goldfish stand on the floor of the House sharing their “lived experiences”, which are totally fabricated. Not only that, these people are our rulers or at least members of the ruling class. Things would be less ridiculous if a state put a horse in the Senate. Calling this clown world is an affront to the men who dedicated their lives to making kids laugh at the circus.

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00:00: Opening
02:00: Who’s In Charge?
22:00: The Desperate Grasp For Legitimacy
42:00: Fantasy Land
57:00: Closing

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The Devil’s Work

Posted on February 4, 2021 by thezman

There is an old expression that has fallen out of favor in the post-scarcity age, but it may be the key to understanding the current crisis. That expression is, “Idle hands do the Devil’s work.” When people do not have anything productive and useful to do with their time, they are more likely to get involved in trouble and criminality. A variant of this is “The Devil makes work for idle hands.” The idea there is if you want to avoid Old Scratch, then make sure you keep yourself useful to God.

The source of these proverbs is unknown, but variations of them go back to the early middle ages, so it is probable they evolved with Christianity. It is not unreasonable to think the idea is universal to civilization. After all, every human society has had to deal with the idle, lazy, and troublesome. Making sure these people are kept too busy to cause trouble is one of those primary challenges of civilization. Every ruler has known that too many idle young men is bad for his rule.

Even in the smaller context, this is something we instinctively know. In the workplace, people with too much free time get into trouble. If the IT staff has too much free time, they start tinkering around with the stuff that is working and before long that stuff stops working and the system goes down. A big part of what goes on inside the schools is to keep the kids and the teachers busy. Home schoolers have known for years that the learning content is just a few hours a day. The rest is busy work.

The point here is that people of all ages need a purpose, something that occupies their mind and their time. If something useful and productive is not filling that need, then something useless or unproductive will fill the void. For most people this may be a hobby or leisure activity. For others, it often means a useless activity is turned into something important. Elevating the mundane to the level of the critical and then creating drama around the performance of the mundane activity.

This is what we see in our political class. The ruling class of every society has a ceremonial role, a procedural role, and a practical role. Outside of a crisis like a war or natural disaster, the political class is performing its duties in the same way a line worker in a factory preforms his role. In popular government this means the pol shows up at public events. He performs the tasks his office requires like signing papers and casting votes. He helps grease the wheels when they need grease.

Into the 20th century, most of our political offices were part-time jobs. State legislatures met for a short period during the year. Otherwise, the legislators were back home doing their jobs. Executive positions like governor and president were fulltime jobs, as they were in charge of the civil service and in the case of president, commander-in-chief of the military. Within living memory, Washington DC would empty out in the spring and remain empty until the fall when Congress returned.

What we see today is politics at all levels has become a full-time job, but one with less to do when it was considered a part-time job. Congress, for example, is something close to a 24-hour drama now. The politicians and their retinues are now doing politics as a full-time obsession. Yet almost all of what they do is unnecessary. In fact, much of what they do is harmful. Very few things passed by Congress enjoy the support of the majority of the people or even a large plurality.

It is not just that these part-time jobs have been made into full-time obsessions. It is that much of what we used to need from government is now filled by individuals, ad hoc networks, and the private sector. Much of what government does is actually done by private contractors on government contracts. One of the ironies of the post-Cold War world is that the federal workforce has declined relative to the population, while the number of people employed in politics has gone up.

Then there is the fact that much of what government does could be automated or simply eliminated entirely. The services that are required like renewing licenses and paying fees can all be automated. In many cases they have been, but that did not result in fewer people, as we see in the dreaded private sector. Instead, it resulted in more idle hands looking for a purpose. On the political side, much of what Congress does could also be eliminated or automated.

What has happened in the last 30 years is we have grown the idle class at the top of our society and while decreasing their necessity. Much of what goes on in our politics is make work designed to get public attention. Think about it. If the cable news channels were shuttered and the social media platforms run by the oligarchs were closed, what would change in America? Nothing of practical importance. Our world would get quieter and there would be a boom in forgotten hobbies.

American political culture evolved during the Cold War to fight communism and prevent a nuclear war. Those were important tasks that occupied the minds and hands of the political class. Once those things went away, those idle hands searched about for a new crisis. Health care, Gaia worship, Islam and now invisible Nazis have been used to keep the idle hands of the political class busy. In the process, the political class has been driven mad and is threatening the rest of society.

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Monthly Archives: February 2021