White Fragility

Posted on March 5, 2021 by thezman

One of the strange things about living through a particular time is that things that define that age in the moment just seem to pop up from nothing. For example, one day two men getting married is a punchline to a joke. The next day you are in human resources signing your termination papers for mocking homosexual marriage. One day men in drag are something you recall your parents laughing at and the next day your kid’s teacher is in a frock demanding you call him “they” for some reason.

The reason these things feel like they have sprung from nowhere is most people are normal, living normal lives. They are too busy living those normal lives to look into who is plotting what over in the shadows of the managerial class. Most of us live outside the world of elite opinion, so we cannot see it evolving and embracing the latest boutique opinions to wear around like amulets. By the time we notice, the finished product has been imposed onto the culture.

That is what’s useful about looking into the people profiting from the new moral panic of whiteness and its related items, like white supremacy. Russ Travers is Mumbly Joe’s new antiwhite crusader. Before he was an antiwhite crusader, he was an anti-Muslim crusader in the now largely defunct War on Terror™. He got canned last spring as the Trump administration tried to purge these people from the system. He claims it was due to his demand to go after whites, instead of Muslims.

Of course, what was really going on is this guy was getting off the anti-Muslim bus and jumping on the anti-white bus. He saw that the former was a dying racket, but the former offered an ambitious career man like him many new opportunities. Rather than try his luck in the dreaded private sector, which is worse than death, he quickly became an evangelist against white supremacist terror. Again, yesterday the great threat was Islam and today the great threat is you. Just like that.

In reality, this antiwhite pogrom was in the works for years. You see that in the resume of Robin DiAngelo, the authoress of the book White Fragility. She started out trying to grift on the feminism stuff, but that was an overserved market, so she tried getting into the diversity rackets, but then she stumbled into the gold mine. She could be a life coach to guilty white liberals, in major corporations and government, helping them confront their white privilege and implicit racism.

Does Mx DiAngelo believe the nonsense she promotes? Probably not. Conmen believe in one thing. “You can’t cheat an honest man; never give a sucker an even break or smarten up a chump.” What she believes does not matter. It is what the chumps she is fleecing believe that matters. The managerial class, which has the money and power, believes white people are the problem, so grifters like Robin DiAngelo are there to tell them they are right. Russ Travers will protect them.

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.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00: Opening
02:00: White Nationalism (Link)
22:00: White Privilege (Link) (Link)
37:00: White Supremacy (Link) (Link)
52:00: White Fragility (Link)

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

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

https://youtu.be/A6WUNJmLQ5U

The Best Laid Plans

Posted on March 4, 2021 by thezman

Anyone who has had to plan a project or organize an event knows that the plans never turn out as expected. Even the most cynical veterans know their plans will run into some unexpected snafu. In fact, the word “snafu” comes from the people who spend most of the time planning things, the military. The word “snafu” comes from the acronym SNAFU, which was popularized during the Second World War. It is why we have another military saying. “No plan survives contact with the enemy.”

This may be what we are about to witness with The Pretender. The people who rigged the election knew Biden was unlikely to last his entire term. He is an old man in poor health and the White House is not the place for an octogenarian. He would either drop dead, become incapacitated or, most likely, lose his marbles so bad that he would have to be removed. This is why Pelosi pushed a bill to form a 25th Amendment commission in the fall of last year. She was planning ahead.

The thing is though, the plan was for Biden to be well enough to sign off on whatever the Democrats could rush through the House and Senate. The rhythm of politics is the first year of a new administration is when things can get done. The people inside the Green Zone believe the public is as happy as they are to be rid of Trump, so they want to push through all of their schemes as fast as possible. It is why the people who really run things have had Biden sign close to 50 executive order.

They also need Biden to help sell these schemes. This was the lesson of Obama’s first term when Congress deadlocked on health care. Obama sat on the sidelines letting Pelosi run the show. The project quickly went sideways, took forever to get done and the result was an embarrassing mess. We are seeing the same thing with Biden, who is quickly becoming a vegetable. The White House is now forced to spend most of their time hiding this guy from the public because of his dementia.

Most people think the plan was to nurse Biden along for a couple of years, then use year three to remove him from office. The more cynical thought the plan was to dump him after the election and install Harris. It is hard to know, but the people around Biden seem determined to keep their man upright for as long as possible. So far, the media is going along with the scheme to shield the truth of Biden’s condition from the public, but how long the White House staff can keep this going is hard to know.

Of course, it is also possible that no one thought much about what happens after installing a dementia patient in the White House. They just hated Trump so much they did not care if Biden was a corpse. They are starting to think about it now though and that is going to be the story here in the coming months. If Biden’s own party no longer trusts him with the basics of his office, it will not be long before they start noticing that he is basically the Max Headroom presidency now.

The other part of the plan is also going sideways. The plan said that once Trump was gone, he was gone for good. The people would hold a triumph for the those who vanquished the monster and the monster would be gone. It turns out that the Left needed him more than he needed them. To continue the analogy, they continue to carry the corpse of Trump around, pretending it is still alive. Given the people involved, it is more than a bit ironic that they did not learn from Kritzinger’s story.

That’s another problem with the plan. It was always better to have Trump inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in. Trump is a gifted shit-talker. It is what got him the nomination. Now he gets to be the shadow president, mocking and jeering the Biden administration and his old enemies in the tent. Trump was not very good at being president, but he will be very good at mocking Biden’s mental decline. That will make it page one news going forward.

None of this should be a surprise. The people in the Green Zone are gifted schemers with a vermin-like rapacity. They live to undermine the rules and subvert the natural order, but they have never been very good at running things. They are not very good at thinking about downstream consequences. The fact that their grand plan to “restore our democracy” has sprung so many leaks is hardly a surprise. It’s why they are obsessed with the ridiculous Q hoax.

The lesson here is that politics is never about planning. It is about opportunity. This is true regardless of the political system. Politics is about human behavior and people are too irrational to fit into a plan. Good politics is always being prepared to take a bite out of the other side and boost your side. Sometimes, that means working with people you hate, which is what the Democrats should have done with Trump. It is a lesson dissidents should keep in mind as the Biden story unfolds this summer.

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The Modern Prison State

Posted on March 3, 2021 by thezman

One of the unexpected consequences of the information age is that we have less reliable information, despite have vastly more data. We have facts about the world now that were unimaginable a generation ago. The facts of our society are stashed in massive searchable databases that are accessible to most everyone. You may need some skill to access them, but the data is there. Even data that should be private is available if you are willing to pay for it.

In contrast, the information about our world that we can trust has collapsed into the set of things we can verify on our own. Information is not the same as data, which is a collection of facts. How many miles you drive to work every day is a fact. Information is what we can derive from those facts. If your commute takes an hour and it is 50 miles, we can conclude that you mostly use the highway to get to work, based on some simple math using those two data points.

In theory, information should be value free, as it is facts plus testable logic, with the result being subject to comparisons with the reality. If the information you derive from someone’s driving data indicates he is breaking the speed of sound on his way to work, we know your facts or logic are wrong. The trouble here is that information is not readily testable against reality. We tend to rely on the reputation of the person providing the information and how it fits within our own observations.

That’s the other important distinction between data and information, at least regarding the way in which these words are used in popular discourse. While they are often used interchangeably, data is an objectively true fact, while information is true according to a set of logical rules. Since those rules can be conditional, information can be valid and invalid, depending upon those conditions. “All bachelors are unmarried” is true as long as the word “bachelor” is defined to mean “a man who has not married.”

This may seem a bit esoteric, but it gets to the heart of the crisis in the West. For most of human history and all of Western history, the relationship between data and information was different than we see today. For medieval man, there was never a lot of data about the world, but he could trust the information about it. This was not just the natural world. He could trust the truths about his society, his gods, the people in charge of his society and the sources of his information.

In the modern age, and really just in the last generation, this relationship has flipped around the other way. We have all the data we need for any question. We know more about world than we really want or need to know. What we lack is information and more important, trustworthy sources of information. Medieval man could rely on the Church or the local lord to maintain the rules of society. The only thing modern man can know about his sources of information is they are wrong.

Modern man is now awash in both misinformation and disinformation, in addition to false information. Misinformation is deliberately inaccurate information, which is intended to deceive. Disinformation is deliberately inaccurate information, but from an institution like the state or the media. Of course, false information is information that is inaccurate due to bad data or logic. Compounding this is the current campaign against misinformation and disinformation.

The first thing you should notice is the people most responsible for the tsunami of disinformation are claiming to be at war with disinformation. Unless this results in mass suicide by media and entertainment, it means they are lying. Note also the use of the term “expert” in that piece. There is no such thing as a disinformation expert, outside of the institutions promulgating disinformation. One cannot be an expert at doing something unless you are actually doing that thing.

Note also how the primary sources of both misinformation and disinformation talk about this phenomenon as if they are the victims of it. The managerial class is the single source for the flood of false information. Pranksters may post gags on line to fool people, but the practical joke has been a part of life since the stone age. The online version is just an extension of the flaming bag of dog poo. What the managerial class is doing is a firehose of falsehoods with the stamp of authority.

Put another way, the new phase of the misinformation/disinformation tsunami is the managerial state crying out in pain as it strikes the society over which it rules. The next front in the crisis will be agents of the state arresting people on trumped up charges, for imaginary crimes against the state. This is the Douglas Mackey case. An entirely powerless person is arrested for a crime that does not exist, because the disinformation system says he was passing misinformation on-line.

Since the first humans began to settle into large communities, human organization has relied upon social trust, enforced by a code. Social trust worked in two directions, vertically and horizontally. People could trust their neighbors because they were like them and accepted the same codes of conduct. People trusted their rulers because those rulers enforced the code and attained their positions based on the logic in that code of society. Trust was side-to-side and up-and-down.

Modern economics is turning the horizontal trust of American society into cash equivalents and hauling it away to the pirate coves of finance capital. Americans are living in a world of strangers. The disinformation campaigns intended to distract from this realty are eating away at the vertical trust. Americans no longer trust the people in charge of their society. That distrust is quickly morphing into a distrust of and contempt for the system itself.

Smart people look at the economic model of America and wonder how it can keep going on as it is. The fact that it does go on suggests it can keep going on, but it seems to be violating the rules of the universe. The same can be said for the collapse of social trust and the growing contempt for the system. How long can the people in charge expect to remain in charge when the people over whom they rule are increasingly convinced the rulers and their system are evil and corrupt?

Perhaps that is the final trick of financialization. The first trick was to subvert the basic rules of exchange between people. All of those rules we learned from economics no longer make any sense. The final trick is to subvert the rules of logic themselves, making it so no one can believe or trust anything or anyone. The disinformation age is the final part of the modern prison. Everyone is alone, no one can trust anything, even the laws of the universe. You just have to do what you are told.

The Ongoing Panic

Posted on March 2, 2021 by thezman

Depending upon when you mark the start of the Covid mass hysteria, we are either coming up on the one year anniversary or have just past it. Panic was setting in as early as January, but that was mostly with people who saw a profit in it. It was in February when the mass media started picking up on it. For example, no one was wearing a mask at CPAC 2020, which was in February. By March you could not buy a mask anywhere, along with toiletries and paper products.

A year on, we are getting a better picture of what happened in what may go down as one of the great mass panics in human history. Given that the panic is still with us, the picture that is emerging is blurry and incomplete. In parts of the US and Europe, Covid has turned into a weird religion. It is not just a public health issue to be managed and navigated, but a stand-in for Old Scratch. The faithful are not only vigilant, they are Covid vigilantes, minding everyone’s business about it.

One thing we are seeing is a collapse in the number of confirmed cases. This is in line with what we know about past pandemics. The number of cases is slow at first, often because we have no way of testing for the new bug. Then the number of cases rises quickly, partly due to awareness and partly due to panic. In the mass media age, the need for attention surely drove the case count. Contrary to media narratives, the drop in cases has nothing to do with government efforts.

In fact, there is no evidence that any of the measures, public or private, had any impact on the spread of Covid. The fact is the only way to slow the spread of a virus like this is what the Chinese did and that is lock everyone in their homes. Even the Chinese found this to be close to impossible. What the West could do and is doing is theater. It is about protecting the political health of the ruling class, by convincing enough people that the government is doing something about the virus.

Political theater is an essential element of liberal democracy. We live in the modern version of a Dionysian age. All public acts are public performances, and all public performances are part of the larger morality play of politics. Facts and the discourse upon facts is purely a private affair. It is why everything about Covid has been politicized and only came to our attention when it could be politicized. For a year we have been watching Covid theater, rather than a public health response.

Once the drama runs its course on the big stage, and it seems to be reaching that point now that Mumbly Joe is staggering around the White House, it will go off-Broadway and then close up shop entirely. The mass roll out of vaccines with highly questionable claims to effectiveness looks like the way out for government. Once the old people are vaccinated, they can then claim herd immunity has been reached and the rest of the public can get the jab at their leisure.

One caveat to that prediction is that the Covidians are getting worked up over the new strain of Covid. This is the super-Covid that the oracles prophesied back in the before times when this all started. This one is “armed with enhanced capabilities.” Apparently it has infrared vision and portable drones. Additionally, the Nth wave people will be with us forever, it seems. Then you have the Covid industrial complex that has invested heavily in lockdowns and all that surrounds it.

Assuming that the panic does end, and this drama moves off the stage this year, we will also start to get a sense of the degree of madness we have witnesses. For example, we are already getting a hint in the annual flu numbers. In Britain, the number of influenza cases was zero this flu season. Maybe we have witnessed a miracle or maybe Covid kills the influenza virus. Most likely, the flu numbers have been re-classed as Covid, which appears to be the case in the US.

The truth is most cases we call the flu are caused by unknown pathogens. In fact, only about 20% of flu cases treated by the medical system are known to be the flu. The rest are from something else. Since the medicines for treating the symptoms do the job, no one really cares what caused the symptoms. It is why we do not mandate testing for the flu or the common cold. Up until the past year, we just accepted the fact that people get sick in winter and sometimes need to be treated for it.

Once the dust settles and the sober minded can begin to look at the data, what we will find is that the number of deaths was wildly exaggerated. Similarly, the number of people needing hospitalization was also exaggerated. This is common to all pandemics in the modern age. Even the Spanish Flu was exaggerated. A lot of the deaths attributed to it were from other factors, like poor hospital conditions, poorly trained doctors, bad nutrition, and other pathogens.

Another lesson will be that modern government is not capable of managing a genuine crisis, even a mild one like Covid. The story emerging from New York shows that the people making the decisions not only lacked the basic skills to manage a crisis, but they were obsessed with the politics of the moment. Like everything about partisan politics, everyone chose sides. The left-wing states chose first, so the right-wing states were left with the right answer by default. That is no way to run a country.

It is not just a partisan political problem. It is a systemic one. This paper examining the political economy of this panic looks at the role of mass media. The initial reality of the virus was amplified by the mass media, which the decision makers in government rely upon as their primary information source. They acted on the exaggerated claims, which had the effect of confirming those claims to the public. This was picked up and magnified by the media and we had a vicious cycle.

The interesting bit in that paper is the parallel between how a virus spreading faster in a dense population and how panic spreads in a media dense population. Before the mass media age, most people were outside the media environment, in the same way most people were outside urban areas in agrarian times. Just as a pathogen needs a network of people, bad information needs a way to pass from person to person. Our connected age is now a breeding ground for informational pandemics.

Another aspect to this is a growing number of people seem to need the emotional energy that comes from crisis. We saw this in the early days of Covid. The auxiliary volunteer army of scolds were suddenly swarming the public square. That energy eventually transferred to fighting the virus that they call Trump supporters and insurrectionists but is now looking for a new host. They will need another panic this spring and you can be sure one will be supplied.

Carny World

Posted on March 1, 2021 by thezman

Note: The Monday Taki post is up. This week I use the expression “of course” far too many times. Of course I do. There’s also new content behind the green door. I’m watching Deep Space Nine and not liking it very much.

It is easy to forget, but one of the predictions about the post-scarcity, technological age was that it would result in a great leveling of society. Class it was argued, was the result of there never being enough for everyone. Once there was plenty, there would be no need for some to horde at the expense of others. Of course, the high-tech society would abandon the silliness of class distinctions. Everyone would wear gray Lycra jumpsuits and happily perform their roles in society.

Like so much that comes from the Utopians, the class-less society assumed things about people that could never be true. Hierarchy is an essential part of the human condition, which means signaling status is a feature, not a bug. The rich guy driving the expensive car is signally his status in the same way a chieftain would signal his status with ornamental weaponry. Even in a world where everyone can rely on having plenty of the essentials, status and status signally still matter.

In fact, they probably count for more in a rich society than a poor one. A guy who is worth fifty million can do a lot of signaling. He can have a supercar, a big house in the country, expensive tastes. The billionaire can have all of those things, of course, and that is a big problem. How does the billionaire show he is a bigger fish than the guy worth fifty million? He needs to have other stuff like political access, cultural influence, and global attention. His status is measured in attention.

Attention as currency is not confined to the plutocrats. This is one distinguishing feature of the media age that arose with the American empire. Before WW2, the super-rich would build mansions and fund public projects like theaters, colleges, and museums, but this was always what the top of society did to reinforce public virtue. In the medieval period, the elite built churches, and cathedrals. In the Renaissance they supported great artists and later they supported the sciences.

The world changed after the war as material progress suddenly accelerated with the spread of American-style capitalism. Material excess first took root in America and with it the growth of the attention society. Popular culture, after all, is about getting public attention in some way. In the early phase of pop culture, people got famous through some talent for entertainment. Now people get attention by being unusually freakish, deranged, or hysterical. The crazier the better.

This is why so many people now experience the world with their mobile device held up in front of their face. They are mining their daily experience for the currency of the age, which is often a viral video or a lot of likes on the social media platform. It is also why the super-rich are fond of supporting increasingly deranged social fads. If the freak show is the cathedral of the modern age, the super-rich must show their status by building bigger and better freak shows for the people.

One result of the giant freak show is that the culture is becoming less rational as it becomes more bizarre. The governor of New York, for example, gets a pass for murdering old people through ineptitude, but he could end up in jail for upsetting a gentle lady in his employ. Of course, that gentle lady could very well have an OnlyFans account and be in favor of mutilating children, so crazy people can pretend that sex is an imaginary part of the patriarchy.

In other words, the attention seeking society is one in which you can be both a vulgar degenerate and an intolerant prude. The media is awash in messages to young women saying they can only fulfill their purpose in life by being a slut. On the other hand, if a man treats a woman like a slut, he gets chased by an angry mom of sluts. You can be certain that the women claiming Cuomo hurt their delicate feelings are mouthy advocates for every vulgar item on the feminist to do list.

Morality is the software of every human society. It is the unwritten set of rules, the habits of mind, that allow strangers to navigate their way around one another. Morality must have a point and that point is reflected in the organization of society. In a warrior society, the qualities of the warrior are the goals of society. In an aristocratic society, privilege, duty, and honor bound the moral code. The morality of this age is wrapped around the desire for public attention, usually public outrage.

Another aspect of the new morality is that it is arbitrary and random. This is true of the carny world, where stardom is usually dumb luck. The world is full of waitresses that look great and can act. Those that get their big break are those who tick the right box at the right time for some reason. This sense that life and death, success and failure are controlled by the fickle gods of fate is the carny code. It is now becoming the America creed, as we embrace the carny culture.

This is clear in the Cuomo story. The reason Andrew Cuomo is governor is he is the son of a famous mobster. He won the lucky sperm contest. The Covid panic was another big break for him. He got to carry on like a hero, despite the fact he was recklessly putting the lives of old people in jeopardy. The fates were kind to Cuomo, until another turn of the wheel brought him low. Like the tragic figures popular in the carny world, he will be ruined because he made a small mistake, not a big one.

It turns out that the post-scarcity world is like a giant carnival tent. The only thing holding people together is a desire for attention. They need the crowd in order to get the attention of the crowd. Semi-retarded basketball players become billionaires because they are the best performers in the human flea circus. Dingbat barmaids become congressmen because they are good at getting attention. Post-scarcity America is carny world, a freak show celebrating the worst humanity has to offer.

The Z Blog

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Monthly Archives: March 2021

White Fragility

The Best Laid Plans

The Modern Prison State

The Ongoing Panic

Carny World