Shorting Biden

Posted on August 18, 2021 by thezman

Note: This coming Saturday, there will be an on-line debate between Jared Taylor and E. Michael Jones. The topic, “Is Race an Important Reality or a Fiction?”, will have Taylor on the race realist side and Jones on the race denialist side. The debate will be LIVE on Saturday, August 21, on Entropy, DLive, and Odysee at: 1pm L.A. / 4pm New York / 21:00 London / 22:00 Stockholm.

Way back when the Democratic Party stepped into to halt their voters from picking the wrong option, the immediate response from most observers was that Biden would be a caretaker president if he won. Most people, of course, assumed a man with serious cognitive decline was never going to win election, but 2020 was a good reminder that authoritarian regimes have no respect for the general will. Biden was installed as the short-term answer to their Trump problem.

How long he lasted was assumed to be a function of his ability to stand up and read the lines provided by the script writers. The “long Biden” camp said he would serve out his term, but not run for re-election. Harris or maybe someone else would be the nominee for 2024 with his blessing. The “short-Biden” camp said he would be lucky to make it to the midterm. His cognitive decline would become so obvious that he would be forced out one way or another and Harris would take over.

There was always another element to the politics that was pushed to the background in the excitement to depose Trump. The left-liberals have not been unified in a long time and the Biden-Harris ticket was a compromise between the two main factions. The one faction is the Obama side. If you look at the people around Biden in his campaign and his White House, they are mostly Obama loyalists. On the other hand, Harris was surrounded by Clinton people and remains so as VP.

The Biden-Harris ticket was not only a compromise, but a way to secure the support of the semi-permanent arm of the party, by freezing out the socialists. The apparatchiks would side with Trump before siding with Sanders. They could control Trump on the things that mattered to them. There was no telling what Sanders would do. What Biden-Harris promised to the apparatchiks was a return to the old order, so they would move heaven and earth to get them past public opposition.

Just as the exit from Afghanistan has not followed the script, the Biden-Harris compromise has not worked as hoped. Team Biden is proving to be far more radical than Washington expected. Their Carter-esque domestic agenda is reminding a lot of people of the 1970’s. Serious retail inflation is not transient after all. Instead, it is becoming a part of the public’s calculus. Retail spending has dropped this summer as people adjust to a world of rising prices for essentials.

Then you have the Covid panic which the script said was supposed to end in the summer, in time for Independence Day. They could call it the Trump plague and pretend that Biden had magically cured the nation of this affliction. It is easy to forget that Biden promised it would all be over by July. Instead, the crazies have turned it into a positional good to signal their allegiance to the new religion. This promises to set off more economic and social chaos this fall with new mandates.

The Harris side of the team has been slowly trying to pivot away from what the Biden side has been doing on a wide range of things. Note how hard they worked to keep her away from the border crisis. They see that as a disaster created by the Biden people, so they are hoping to leave that tar baby where it belongs. On the other hand, the Biden side is making sure to keep Harris from getting any positive press. They have been spreading rumors about her in the media to dirty her up.

This friction within the left-liberal wing of the political side of the party would not matter very much if not for the Afghan disaster. While normal people are happy to be free of that mess, the party is roiling over the fall out. The regime media is now full of attacks on the Biden wing. Here is a piece in the NY Times putting the blame for the collapse on the Biden people. There are stories like this all over regime media, painting a sad picture of how Team Biden let down the Afghans.

To sum up, the Afghan debacle has not only increased the tensions within the Biden-Harris coalition, but it has driven a wedge between that coalition and the apparatchiks who do most of the governing. There were leaked stories about how the Harris people were talking openly about the 25th Amendment. Even if true, they will need the support of the apparatchiks as well as congressional Democrats. They can’t just bust into the Oval Office and seize control of the state.

What this summer has shown is the “short Biden” people were probably right about how long Biden remains in office. His condition is so bad he is rarely seen. That is not going to get better. You can be sure the Clintonistas surrounding Harris are scheming with their old friends in the semi-permanent side of the party to engineer a coup to remove Biden sooner rather than later. Recall that the State Department is filled with Clinton loyalists, and they opposed the Afghan withdraw.

The question is when and how is Biden sidelined? If you wanted to give Harris the best chance at reelection, sooner is better than later. This would provide her time to consolidate her hold over the party. On the other hand, if Biden were to drop dead in office, everyone could pretend it was an outpouring of love for him that swept the left-liberals to victory in the midterms. That assumes the full support of the apparatchiks to make sure the vote goes as expected.

The Biden people are not without their options. The one important card they have is that Harris is a weird blend of stupidity and offensiveness. She had all the resources one could want in the primary and managed to drive her own popularity down to zero by simply being herself. Having a dementia patient in the White House is manageable but a bitter ingrate with a chip on her shoulder is a problem. Putting angry DMV lady in the Oval Office could turn out to be bigger disaster than Afghanistan.

Of course, the other option is to find a way to remove Harris first and replace her with someone the party can trust. Then they can pillow Biden before the midterm and run the sympathy script they have ready. This is one of those three cushion shots that makes sense until you think about the options to replace Harris. It reveals the bigger problem with the party. They have run out of people with the minimum of competence, which is how they ended up with Mumbly Joe in the White House.

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Regimeology

Posted on August 17, 2021 by thezman

Back during the Cold War, there were people whose job was to figure out what was happening inside the Soviet government. Many were like F.B.I. profilers, in that they were hyped as experts, but just made up stuff to play the role. Others actually tried to read party media to figure out what was happening. These Kremlinologists were well-versed in the “Aesopian language” popular with both dissidents and party officials, so they could connect external clues to internal clues.

One of the many signs that America is authoritarian is that we have to use the same tactics to figure out what is happening with the ruling elite. The uniparty members are mostly just making noises to impress the faction leaders. They are the dancing boys of the American regime. Still, they give a sense of the mood within the factions. The media gives a sense of what is happening with party leadership, especially the semi-permanent elements within the security branches.

This is where the Afghanistan story is useful. There is no denying that it is an embarrassment to the regime. The Biden people were selling this as a smooth transition out of an untenable situation. Instead, they got images of people fleeing for their lives as the Taliban swoops in to capture the capital. The people who say optics don’t matter were once again reminded that they are missing a chromosome. Even in authoritarian regimes, optics count for a great deal, even if it just inside the party.

There is some speculation that elements within the regime were opposed to pulling out of Afghanistan and may have sabotaged the effort. There is evidence that the Pentagon and State Department were opposed, but there are no signs they plotted the collapse of the Afghan government. If they were that clever, they would have figured out how to avoid this in the first place. Instead, this is probably just more of the 4-D chess nonsense that has become popular on-line.

Instead, the media reports suggest those semi-permanent elements within the regime knew Afghanistan was a house of cards and they were prepared to pin the blame on the elected elements of the regime. CNN, of all places, is unloading on the Biden people for their incompetency. The NY Times and Washington Post are taking the neocon line and attacking Biden for leaving the “Afghan allies” to die. This open letter to the White House is like Pravda condemning Kremlin policy in the old days.

The question is why did the Biden people push forward with a policy they knew the rest of the party opposed? This is where you may have some 4-D chess, in that there may be a third man in the relationship. Clearly, the Biden people did not see this coming, so they must have been getting bogus advice from the Pentagon and State Department or at least elements within those silos. Maybe this a way to discredit the foreign policy establishment to justify sweeping changes.

This is the clue in the Biden speech. He made clear that this move was about closing the door on the past to repositioning for the future. That is coded language to mean the old Bush era foreign policy is dead or that is the plan. Coupled with the quiet abandonment of Ukraine, the old neocon obsession with their old demons will no longer be the priority of the new foreign policy. Given the infestation of neocons in regime media, this would explain the media attacks on Biden over Afghanistan.

The new foreign policy will focus on China. Little reported during all the excitement of removing Trump and installing Biden is that the Biden people have embraced the Trump China policy with few changes. They are enforcing the trade polices imposed by Robert Lighthizer during the Trump years and doing so aggressively. They are following the Trump position on the genocide in Xinjiang, which is a big deal. They have also allowed US representatives to travel to Taiwan without special permission.

The stakes could not be any higher in this intra-party conflict. The crusades against Islam have been very lucrative for the military industrial complex, both in financial opportunities as well as prestige. A trade war with China is not as sexy for them and not as remunerative. The State Department, of course, is geared to fight the old enemies so a sea change in priorities is very bad for business. For example, having old relatives in Ukraine is suddenly less important than Chinese language skills.

It is too soon to tell how this will unfold. Old regimes get loud, preachy and impervious to contrary facts. We see that with the American regime. The factions are led by fossils from a bygone era. We see the elected side on television, but the leadership of the other factions is just as ossified. They may be younger than the elected leaders, but their minds are frozen in time. No one in party leadership seems to be aware of what is happening outside the strongholds of the regime.

One possibility is that Afghanistan is treated like the party treated Khrushchev’s handling of Cuba in the 1960’s. The party was happy to treat the affair as a disaster, so they could remove him from office. We are already hearing whispers that Biden’s fragile state is the cause of the Afghan debacle. The disappearance of Harris the last few months is another clue. Taking her out of the spotlight keeps her clean and allows everyone to forget about her being an obnoxious idiot.

All we can know at this point is that the regime is very fragile right now. On the one side is a faction locked in the past and staffed by incompetents. They were the people who spent 20 years creating the new Afghanistan. On the other side is the gerontocracy desperately trying to cling to life. Then you have the new vibrant young guns who want to show off what their learned in grievance studies. There is deep tension within the American ruling regime that promises to get worse.

Lessons From Afghanistan

Posted on August 16, 2021 by thezman

Note: There is new content behind the green door. If you are not signed up, please consider it as it will bring you happiness and save your soul. Sunday Thoughts covers the Afghan situation and some other interesting new items. The Taki post is up and it is about the Afghanistan debacle. There is a pattern here.

Over the last week, the world has watched the great project of the American empire fall to pieces as if it was a controlled demolition. The Taliban has swept across Afghanistan, facing little more than token resistance from the official government. In fact, the official government fled the country without even pretending to care. As of Sunday evening, the U.S. government was scrambling to figure out how to evacuate the people with American citizenship while begging the Taliban for relief.

This week, regime elements will be playing the blame game, no doubt settling on the previous administration as the real culprit. Faced with disconfirmation of their beliefs, the new religion of our rulers triggers a process whereby they are convinced that the latest setback is actually part of the great plan. It is a sort of test of faith and the only way to get past it and continue the flow of history is to believe harder. In time, this will become a bloody shirt in the way Vietnam was for a generation.

Putting that aside, the collapse of the Afghan model reveals some things about the ruling regime that are useful to dissidents. The big lesson is that the Washington regime never felt it necessary to subvert the culture of Afghanistan. Instead, they spent twenty years celebrating it. Sure, they did the superficial stuff like flying the flags of various sexual deviants over the embassy, but they never tried to impose it on the Afghans in the same was we see them do it to white Americans.

If the Afghans were white, the empire would have accused them of Afghan privilege or maybe Afghan supremacy then set about destroying their culture. There would have been gay imams in rainbow colored tunics preaching about how Muhamad was really into sodomy. Of course, there would have been a heavy emphasis on women’s sports, perhaps fielding an all lesbian soccer team. None of that happened because that would have been insulting to the Afghans and their ways.

The big thing that the empire did not do that they are doing in their alleged home base of America is replace the people. A big part of the war on whiteness is the importation of millions of nonwhites into white countries. It is part of the dialectic made real, where mass immigration is the negation of white culture. The empire could have done this in Afghanistan with no trouble. There are a billion Africans looking for a better deal, so they could have imported some of them to celebrate diversity.

That really is the telling feature of the twenty year occupation. The rules in place over there were the exact opposite of the rules in place over here. There was no systematic statue toppling, no mass media campaigns against Afghan culture and no chanting about diversity being a strength. One could be forgiven for thinking that the people in charge of the American empire have more respect for Afghan culture and Afghan people than they have for the American people and their culture.

These are things most people probably knew, if they took the time to think about it, but the events of last weekend provide a good reminder. In the weeks to come, the ruling class will care more about the fortunes of people in Afghanistan than the victims of their opioid crisis they inflicted on rural America. They will work harder to preserve the “rights” of collaborators left behind in Kabul than the rights of American being held in dungeons around Washington. They hate us that much.

The useful lesson in all of this is these people have once again revealed that they really do believe their own nonsense. The old paleos remain convinced that the elites know their preaching is all nonsense, but the Afghan debacle is proof that they do get high from their own supply. The plan was to celebrate the exit on 9/11 as “mission accomplished” and then forget about the whole thing. Biden would get credit for finishing Obama’s project and ending the Bush war.

Over the weekend, their lack of preparation was on display, as the regime media was not provided with a script to follow. Instead, they were allowed to think for themselves, a dangerous prospect under ideal conditions. They sent Biden out to take questions not vetted in advance and it was another humiliation. The sight of an eighty year old man struggling to do the basics is symbolic of the empire. Like Biden, it is old, senile, and operating on the fumes of past glories that never really happened.

This is not the first time the ruling elite have fallen for their own rhetoric. Back in the Obama years, they were sure the summer of 2010 was going to be “recovery summer” for the economy. They even had a campaign all ready to go. That ended the same way the Afghan withdraw ended. Recall that Biden promised this summer would be the end of the Covid panic. Everyone would get to party again. The prophesies of the new religion have a bad habit of never coming true.

Of course, the big lesson in all of this is that a small, dedicated minority can win against all odds if they refuse to surrender. The irony of the American foreign policy establishment not remembering the story of David and Goliath is one of those things that tells us something about the people in charge. They are just so sure they are on the right side of history, that they never take a moment to consider their role in it. They were the Goliath this time and the Afghans were the David.

Granted, the American military would happily abandon the rules of engagement they labored under in Afghanistan when it comes to whiteness. You can be sure General Milley has a speech ready about how white rage is really a part of some secret connected between white people and the Taliban. That said, men living as they did when Alexander the Great was in Afghanistan fought the mighty U.S. Military to a draw and then drove them from their lands. An inspiration to us all.

In the end, this is how dying empires look from the inside. The people at the top fear self-examination, so they commit to a zealous form of the mentality that made the empire possible in the first place. The empire and their place atop it are the center of their belief system and no disconfirmation will shake that belief. They will die with the empire that makes them possible. What comes next is up to the people who survive the inevitable collapse in order to fill the void of empire.

The Revolution Part I

Posted on August 13, 2021 by thezman

Revolutions are often driven by events, but they are always, at some level, driven by ideas about how society ought to be organized. Since the beginning, radical revolution is about a small group of intellectuals who flatter themselves by claiming to represent the interests of the people. Their holy mission is to reorganize society for the benefit of the people, even if it means killing many of those people. This week begins an exploration into the ideas that motivate our current radicals.

One of the problems the good guys have is a poverty of language to properly frame the events of the day. The bad guys have six million ways to frame events, so they are the white hats and normal people are the black hats. Despite what many claim, this is not about convincing the public. It is about justifying to themselves their actions against the people resisting the revolution. For the people who see themselves as the vanguard of the people, this is important fuel to the revolutionary fire.

The poverty of language stems from a poverty of understanding. The typical conservative pundit has never read any of the radical thinkers who have shaped the minds of the present day radicals. They are happy to chant catch phrases like “socialist” and “communist” but those words just mean “bad guys”. Then you have people who reduce everything to a money grab, which is nothing but a passive way of endorsing the transactional nature of modern existence.

With that in mind, this week’s show is a look at three of the big topics that come up with the radicals in the current crisis. The idea here is not to give a lecture on the writers and texts behind these issues, but to provide a general framework for understand what the radicals mean when they say certain things. There is a lot here, so next week will be another show on the same general topic, but on other subtopics. Who knows, maybe it will turn out to be three shows of material.

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: Disrupt And Subvert
22:00: The Social Construct
42:00: They Might Be Fascists
57:00: Closing (Be Like Me)

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

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The Quest For Meaning

Posted on August 12, 2021 by thezman

Note: There is new content behind the green door. The plan is to have something new three times per week. Some of this is posted on BuyMeABear, but that platform has some limitations as far as what I can post. At some point they promise to have the ability to host everything. If you are not signed up, please consider it as it will bring you eternal happiness and save you from the pits of Hell.

Those over the age of forty or so will remember when people regularly went to see a psychiatrist to discuss their troubles. This was far more common in the upper class than the middle-class, but it was not unknown even among the lower class. It was a regular feature on television shows starting in the 1960’s. By the 1970’s, characters regularly talked about their trips to the shrink. Even today, the shrink is inserted into popular culture, as with the television series The Sopranos.

Psychiatry has fallen out of fashion as it has become obvious that you cannot talk someone out of mental illness. In fact, it sounds primitive and superstitious to think that talking about your troubles with a shaman can help cure them. There are people still clinging to things like Freudian psychoanalysis, but people with some knowledge of the human science know it is quackery. In fact, the entire enterprise of talk therapy is just pseudoscience, like astrology or tarot card reading.

Even so, Freudian quackery had a big impact on the West. It was tangled up with larger assaults on the culture, like the attack on the family. Instead of relying on the culture to cope with the inevitable struggles of marital life, women were encouraged to seek psychiatric help, which preached a form of women’s liberation. This encouraged the adoption of divorce, which swung a wrecking ball through society. It is fair to say that Freud was one of history’s great monsters, as well as a quack.

We have been conditioned to think that we live in the age of reason and that our ancestors were superstitious and irrational. This is a part of the cultural campaign to disconnect us from our past, but it is also a conceit. Our material existence is better, so we assume our technology is better, which means we have a more reasonable and rational understanding of the world. We no longer believe in invisible sky gods that control the natural occurrences we see from our cave.

In some respects, this is true, but in general, those old superstitions were more rational and practical. The unhappy wife spending more time at church did more for her wellbeing than hours with a quack and an eventual divorce. The peace of knowing that after this life, there is a next life of eternal bliss did more for the psyche of regular people than handfuls of anxiety drugs. Those old superstitious primitives in the family album did not try to turn their boys into girls.

Even though some of the nutty ideas like psychoanalysis have been dumped in favor of actual science, we have new crackpot ideas. Panpsychism, for example, is promising to introduce a fresh batch of oogily-boogily into the human sciences. Panpsychism is the idea that consciousness is inextricably linked to all matter and simply grows stronger as a physical object become more complex. That means gravel in your driveway has a consciousness, just less complex than your consciousness.

If it sounds like something someone comes to believe after taking peyote during the bachelor party in Las Vegas, you would be right. It is right out of eastern religion, but it is being pushed by people with claims to science. This is how all quackery ends up in the general culture. People with claims to science dress up their new brand of Gnosticism with the authority of science. It may not be long before “science” is telling us Covid is mutating because it is offended by our vaccines.

The story of man is supposed to operate along the general plot line that starts with primitive superstition and works toward reason. Early humans thought the natural world was animated by spirits. Then it was the creation of the gods. That soon moved to a more complex set of rules imposed by one God. Then God was dropped altogether, and we are left with the rules of nature. That’s the official narrative, yet we are zooming back to the idea of the world being controlled by invisible spirits.

The IQ guys will argue that this is proof we are getting dumber, but modern quackery is always the product of elite culture. Freudian psychoanalysis was not invented and spread by rural mystics. It started in the cosmopolitan elite and then spread to the rest of the population. It was the lower classes that remained stubbornly skeptical about the guys with turtlenecks and pipes. The same thing will be true of panpsychism if it breaks from the laboratory like the Wuhan virus.

It may be that our elites are getting dumber and there is evidence of that, but that does not explain the rise of nonsense in the modern world. Marxism is obvious nonsense when you read it but it spread like a plague in the 19th century. According to the IQ guys, those elites were smarter than our elites, yet many of them fell for what amounts to monstrous quackery. They fell for it because they wanted to believe the glorious future free of conflict was an inevitable outcome of history.

It may be that in the fullness of time, the ape historians will look at what we call the modern age, the period kicked off by the Enlightenment, ending sometime soon, as the great quest for meaning. This is when Western man discarded his religious convictions and went on a long quest for the answer to the great question, but only managed to murder himself in the process. One bit of quackery after another until Western societies could no longer hold and they collapsed into ruin.

You Own You

Posted on August 11, 2021 by thezman

One of the few things that libertarians get right is that the foundation of Western civilization is private property. They claim this is a universal reality, which is clearly incorrect, but it is true with regards to Western civilization. The assumption that a man owns the produce of his labor is the main difference between Europeans and the other people of the world. It forms the foundation of law and the logic of political organization, in addition to being the bedrock of Western economic systems.

What libertarians get wrong is that you can create a society where government only protects private property and does nothing else. As with so many things, they get the causal relationship backwards. Like everything else about human society, the concept of private property is downstream from biology and culture. Therefore, the primary reason to have a state is to defend the people and their way of life. Private property is one attribute of Western people’s way of life.

Putting that aside, the ape historians in the glorious future will no doubt trace the decline of Western man to the decline in private property. It will not begin with socialism or other economic concepts. Those are far downstream from what really matters to a people and their way of life. The Nordic people made socialism work while at the same time maintaining the concept of private property. They simply struck a different balance between property and culture than other occidentals

The erosion of this key facet of the West starts further up the chain of causality at the cultural level. This is where the abstract concept of property exists, the platonic form of private property. This is where the wreckers and subversive have gnawed away at the concept in little ways, thus making it less clear downstream. As a result, the idea of private property has slowly receded from the public discourse with regards to politics and economics, even within socialist debates.

Take, for example, the internet. It exists because thousands of people working in government institutions invented a way to link computers into a network. This is why the internet is a public good. It is the creation of public institutions, in the same way the highway system is a public good. The internet was further built out by private companies seeking to profit from the exchange of information, much in the same way merchants use the highway system to profit from commerce.

This is true with regards to e-commerce. Jeff Bezos is able to hurl himself to the edge of the atmosphere in a giant phallus, because he got rich selling stuff on-line. Like all large corporations, he also bought indulgences from the government, in order to gain an advantage over rivals. First it was not paying sales tax and then he moved onto direct subsidies from state and local government for his supply chain. Like other big retailers. Amazon would not exist without government subsidy.

Amazon, however, is the exception. The rest of the tech oligarchs made their money stealing the property of others. Facebook, for example, sells the property of its users to companies looking for data on the population. They call this marketing revenue, but in reality, it is just theft. They steal the labor of their users and then sell it to interested parties without the knowledge of their users. It is a form of slavery in which the user base volunteers to give away their labor to the platform owner.

Many will push back against this characterization. After all, they will say, the service is free, and the real product Facebook is selling is their own creation. They use their technology to capture human activity. Then they make it accessible in a friendly format for their actual customers, the people paying them. The users, because they are choosing to use the platform, are choosing to abide by an agreement they never read and therefore agree to allow Facebook to steal their property.

That right there is how the concept of private property is eroded at the abstract layer of Western civilization. Most people, even classical liberal types, think what the tech companies are doing is legitimate commerce. They have accepted this degraded version of property that carves out an exception to the laws covering property to allow for what amounts to theft. If Claude-Frédéric Bastiat was sent through the time portal to this age, he would call the internet “legal plunder.”

That is what we are seeing, legal plunder. Property is the product of human labor, both physical labor and mental labor. The business owner, the man who organizes men and material to produce goods and services, sees the return on his intellectual labor in the form of profit. It is his ideas and organizational talent that makes the enterprise possible and maintains its operations. The Marxists always attacked this idea but could never get around the reality of intellectual property being the fruit of labor.

Instead, the way around this problem is to attack the concept that you own you and therefore you own your labor. If Facebook can watch you on-line, track your activity through your mobile device, then sell this activity to their customers, it means one of two things. Either you no longer own you or we no longer have private property. After all, your activity is the product of your labor, so if you own you, then you own your activity and Facebook is stealing. Otherwise, you no longer own you.

If we return to the original Western concept of property, then you not only own your activity but also your reputation and your defining attributes. If a company wishes to use these things in a product, then they would need to strike a deal with you in the same way they would if they wanted your physical labor. If Facebook wanted to sell your data, they would need to get your permission every time they sold your data. The mobile devise makers would have to pay you to use their phones.

Of course, this is not present reality. The assumption is that you do not, in fact, own you, so all of this is perfectly normal. The reason enterprising lawyers have not proposed a novel legal theory to the court based on the ancient concepts of private property is that no one questions the right of the tech companies to harvest your property. The state is acting on this new normal as well. New laws, for example, have been passed to require alcohol tracking devices in new cars.

A world in which you do not own you is called a penitentiary. The phrase “lock down” was quickly normalized, despite being a prison term, because the population has been habituated to the idea that they do not own themselves. Of course, the state can lock you in your home. After all, they can determine your associations and they allow private enterprise to spy on you in your home. You don’t own you. Like a pet, you are the property of powerful interests, and you must do as you are trained.

The point of the state is to preserve the people and their way of life. This is its primary reason to exist. The secondary and tertiary reasons, like crime control and tending to the poor are all dependent on the people and their way of life. The defense of property is one of those attributes of culture the state must defend. The failure of the elites to defend the people and their way of life starts with this Western notion that you own you and all that you produce. That failure is the death of the West.

The Real Pandemic

Posted on August 10, 2021 by thezman

It is very difficult to assess what is happening in a revolutionary moment, because things seem to change so quickly. Looking back, the French Revolution is easier to understand, because we know how it ended. We can look at the events in the context of Napoleon or the Terror. The same is true of the Bolshevik Revolution, that came to a similar end. In fact, putting the two together makes it possible to understand things about both that the people at the time could never know.

This is a useful thing to keep in mind in this age, as the radicals push the revolution forward, for reasons they don’t comprehend. Legacy conservatives will keep trying to jam these events into the obsolete world view, blaming things on the lust for power or a desire to take your money. Others will blame it on nefarious actors like George Soros, because that is the easy thing to do. Blaming a a single bad actor or groups of actors makes things simple for the simple-minded.

In reality, in revolutionary times, men are like people swept up in a great flood, carried along by the forces of nature. They look for things to hang onto in order to escape being swept away, like their own ideological mindset. The revolutionaries are no different in this regard but they convince themselves they are the ones driving the river, when all they have done is unleash the floodgates. They are as much a victim of their own zealous lunacy as the people they oppose.

An example is this story about the city of Charlotte. The city is passing a nondiscrimination ordinance that will protect “gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation and natural hairstyles.” Since all of those things are meaningless word salad, they have, in effect, banned everything and nothing. The term “natural hairstyles” is a cult-Marx term for black women with afros, but otherwise the rest of it just means whatever the mentally ill can conjure next.

The people behind this stuff know that these words and therefore the law is nonsense, but they also know that is the point. They have been trained up in the latest cult-Marx dogma which says they must subvert expectations and undermine the prevailing cultural orthodoxies. They may or may now know what any of that means, but they know enough to know chaos is the order of the day. These terms are all moral signifiers, justifying an all-out assault on cultural norms.

Again, the usual suspects will try to assign specific rational explanations for why they are trying to sow chaos, but that sort of reductionism misses the point. The chaos is the point of all this, as the goal is to smash the cultural orthodoxy. Essential to Nth wave Marxism is the belief that culture is what prevents the natural rise of socialism, so if you destroy the culture, a new socialist order will arise. More important, a new socialist man will rise from the wreckage of white supremacist society.

Like original Marxism, this is nonsense. It is worse than nonsense, in that it is an esoteric religion that flatters the believer by replacing their reality with the promise of special insight. Once you come to believe that wrecking the present order will usher in the great revolution of mankind, you are now in a special club of people who have found the answer to the great question. The irrationality of it is the draw. It appeals to that natural need to believe that is a key trait of man.

What we are living through is a revolution pushed along by people who are sure they are creating conditions for the great liberation. The details of that great liberation and how it will come into existence are just assumed. This was always the appeal of the original Marxism. It provided a childish vison of a glorious future, onto which the believer could project his fantasy vision of the future. Then it supplied a story of history that claimed the glorious future was an historical inevitability.

This the core of Cultural Marxism. Because of the demographic changes in the West, it has been repackaged along racial lines. Instead of destroying bourgeoise culture they are set on destroying white culture. This has obvious appeal to people who came to the West for the free stuff but find that the cost of that free stuff is the abandonment of their old ways. For blacks, of course, it means they get to taste the vengeance that has been promised to them since the last century.

In the lab, this stuff sounds appealing, but when you go around smashing the culture, there is no guarantee what will happen next. The culture tends to restrain the worst passions of the people who produced it. Once those restraints are gone, those passions are released to mix with the passion of the zealots who did the smashing. Imagine an Antifa rally without police protection. All of a sudden, the people who defunded the police discover a truth hidden in their revolutionary furor.

This is why making sense of the revolution is only worthwhile as a way to get a glimpse of what comes next. History shows that the people driving these events are like the coronavirus of the present moment. All efforts to mitigate it result in a mutation that gets around the mitigation. All you can do is prepare for what comes after it has done its worst to the host population. Then maybe you can have a chance to rebuild with an eye on preventing any future outbreaks of this pestilence.

Irrational Losers

Posted on August 9, 2021 by thezman

Note: The weekly Taki post is up. The topic this week is something I hope to dive into on the podcast this week. The revolution from above will be a new favorite phrase. There is also the Sunday podcast up behind the green door.

One of the distinguishing features of conservatism is the habit of attacking its own side during conflicts with the Left. In fact, these self-criticism sessions are usually triggered by left-wing criticism of the Right or in anticipation of such criticism. Somewhere in the middle of the fight, usually when things are looking up for the good guys, conservatives will attack their own team over some small issue. The claim is that the people in error are undermining the fight against the left with their bad ideas.

A recent example is Heather MacDonald taking to the pages of a center-left platform to criticize vaccine skeptics as knuckle-dragging primitives. You see, there are people opposed to the Left who do not hold the same opinions as Heather MacDonald with regards to the vaccines, so those people must be corrected. Sure, things are going badly for the Left on the Covid issue but removing that fly from a friend’s face with a hatchet is too important to wait until after the fight.

There is no question that many people opposed to the strip-mining of what is left of our liberties over the Covid issue are wrong about a lot of things. Some think the vaccine changes your DNA. Some think the vaccines are entirely fake, part of some plot to control society. If you look hard enough, you can probably find people who think the vaccines are an alien technology developed at Area 51. Covid is a ruse to experiment on the public with this new extraterrestrial technology.

America is a big country, so you can find just about every crazy idea imaginable if you look long enough. Why does Mx. MacDonald think these people are worthy of a public tongue lashing? The stated reason is those vaccine skeptics are acting as irrationally as the people they oppose. Some of them think vaccines in general may not be all that safe and are refusing this vaccine. Imagine that? People in the middle of a heated partisan fight putting aside reason to score points against the enemy?

Presumably, Mx. MacDonald thinks these people are harming the cause in some way, so they must be silenced. The claim appears to be reason. You see, by tolerating the unreasonable on her side, it would harm her claims to being the most reasonable person in the room. Therefore, reason compels her to root around the ranks of the people opposed to the Covid madness, looking for the unreasonable. Tone police the unreasonable and then reason will triumph!

Of course, the question is, unreasonable to whom? Politics is always a partisan business, so the central questions are who? and whom? Only unreasonable people think politics can be a right answer business. In most cases, there are many possible right answers, as right is determined by preference. In a democracy, right is determined by convincing the people wielding power behind the scenes that the mobs will be sated with one approach or another. All politics is partisan.

Mx. MacDonald thinks these knuckle-dragging anti-vaxxers are making her look bad to someone, so who is it? That is the key to understanding conservative perfidy and failure over the last half century. What matters most to them is the people in the managerial class and their place in it. It is very important to someone like Mx. MacDonald to never be associated with someone like Alex Jones, who thinks vaccines are making frogs gay and lowering the sperm count of American males.

What reason tells us is that defeating the forces of darkness that have launched the revolution from above is the only concern. If that means siding with people who line their clothes with aluminum foil, so be it. Nothing can come before the destruction of radicalisms in all its forms. This is what reason demands. Otherwise, if the radicals get their way, these people fetishizing their rationality will be keeping the rest of us company in the reeducation camps.

Politics is an ugly business under ideal conditions, because people inevitably assume that the other side of the fight is filled with bad people. After all, they have the wrong opinions and refuse to change them. That means things are said that are not true and not very nice about the other side, but that’s just the nature of it. This is something the people who never stop talking about their rationality should know by now. Reasonable people understand the reality of the human condition.

In the case of the Covid war, there are people making wild claims about the vaccine, mostly to get attention for themselves. That is an argument against social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. These platforms made it easy for stupid people to get on-line and have an opinion. This drew in the sorts of people who look to exploit the mob for their own benefit. This is also the argument against democracy, as laid out in Federalist Papers 10, but here we are anyway.

The thing is, Alex Jones claiming the vaccine will alter your DNA is no nuttier than much of what is in the mass media. In fact, a ridiculous claim is far less harmful than the plausible, but inaccurate claim. Few people will think the vaccine will turn you into Big Foot, but most people will believe we need to make kids wear masks. Far more people have been harmed by official lies than by goofballs on the internet. Again, this is something the “rational conservatives” should understand.

None of this is to say that there can never be criticism of allies or even a break with people who harm the cause. This has always been the problem with outsider politics, which tends to get overrun with weirdos. The issue is timing and intent. Privately chastising an ally for screwing up is reasonable. Dismissing wackos who are harming the cause is prudent. These are exceptions to partisanship that are required in politics, but conservative have made them their purpose.

This is why conservatives always lose. The main principle of the conservative is to conserve their reputation at all costs. No cause is ever so dear as to lead them to spend a penny of their reputation on it. Put another way, for the conservative, there is never anything worth fighting for, so they are always willing to cede the battle to the other side, no matter the cost. The Left sends thugs carrying bats and knives, while the Right sends out dandies dressed like interior decorators.

The test in these matters is this. Is the world better or worse with a small group of people who think vaccines alter your DNA? The obvious answer is the world is not affected in the least by people with crackpot ideas. Is the word made better or worse by allowing the evil of progressivism triumph? The answer is obvious. People fetishizing their rationality should be able to grasp this. Instead, for generations they have come to the opposite conclusion and lost every fight.

The Neoconservative Persuasion

Posted on August 6, 2021 by thezman

The title of the show this week is taken from the title of a book by the guy most consider to be the founder of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol. He was one of the first far-left intellectuals to break with the Left and migrate to the new Right. He embraced the term neocon, in an “own the insult” way, which is probably why the term has remained with us, despite it originally being an insult. The Left used it as a way to criticize their former colleagues for their break with them over various issues.

Today, of course, our side uses the term as an insult. Even within what is left of mainstream conservatism, the term and the people associated with it is falling out of favor, especially as the neocons get nastier in their critiques of populism. David French now sounds like a less masculine version of Robin DiAngelo. That is not an exaggeration, as he sounds like Mickey Mouse, and she sounds like she has had one too many Pall Mall’s with her boiler makers.

Just as it is useful to understand the language of the Left, it is useful to know the intellectual history of the legacy Right. When the Left uses the slur “racist” they do not mean it in the way normal people understand it. This is why it is stupid to debate them on those terms. When you deny being a racist, you are legitimizing the term and their definition of it. If you try to own the insult, you do the same. Instead, when you know their definition, you can attack them from the moral high ground.

The same thing applies to the history of the neocons. Understanding why they say America is an idea, rather than a nation, is key to dealing with the claim. Someone like Ben Shapiro does not really know why he believes America is just an idea. He was simply taught that by his Straussian professors. The same is true of his chanting about Judeo-Christianity. You can strip away the intellectual authority of the claims when you know the source of it. Knowledge is power.

The other thing that we can learn from studying the neocons is how the conservative movement was so easily coopted by them. The reason is that the New Right, as it was called early on, had no moral philosophy of its own. The Buckley movement started from a disposition and then became a reaction to current events. They were not starting from a body of moral philosophy that contradicted the Left. The neocons supplied a morality framed by the founding documents.

It is why any genuine opposition to what is going on in the West must first start with a moral philosophy that stands outside of the prevailing orthodoxy. Only by being able to say, “this is who we are, this is what we believe, this is why we believe it, and this is why it is superior to the alternative” can a genuine alternative blossom. Simply starting with a laundry list of outcomes, desired or opposed, like the Buckley crew, means falling prey to the same sort of corruption that killed conservatism.

This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00: Opening
02:00: The Origin Story
22:00: Leo Strauss
42:00: Never Right
57:00: Closing (Be Like Me)

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https://youtu.be/9FMbMFhBxiU

The Blood Feud

Posted on August 5, 2021 by thezman

A blood feud or blood rivalry is a long conflict between two closely situated groups of people, usually involving retaliatory killing. There is some event, real or imagined, then members of one group attack or kill members of the other group in retaliation for harms they suffered in that initial event. This leads to retaliation from the second group and we have a spiral of tit-for-tat. Until fairly recent in human history, the blood feud was quite common and often formalized in ritual and custom.

When people were more tribal, the blood feud worked to keep the peace. This seems counterintuitive, but the practice allowed for agreed upon compensation to the victim in the form of blood or money. The Wergild, in Germanic law, was the compensation paid by a person committing an offense to the injured party. If the victim was killed, then it was the value of his life. In other cultures, the concept of “blood money” was not uncommon, as a way to adjudicate disputes between clans.

This is something to keep in mind when looking at stories like this one. We have a 100-year-old man being charged with crimes that may or may not have happened at a place he worked over seventy years ago. He may have worked at the Sachsenhausen camp in the Second World War. According to the article, it is not all that clear what happened at that facility. His role in the running in the camp is also unclear. Yet, he is being ceremoniously charged with crimes at the age of 100.

This is not a new story. He is being charged because of the long running blood feud between Jews and Europeans over the events of the war. Jews believe they are victims that can never be compensated for the crimes against them perpetrated by the Europeans in the last century. It is not just Germans. They have claims against other European groups, even Americans, who saved them. The blood feud demands blood, even if it is the blood of an old man not long for this world.

These sort of witch hunts are uncivilized and antithetical to the traditions of the modern world, but they persist because Jews have tremendous amount of influence. Much of that influence, it is believed, rests on their victim status. That last part is mostly nonsense, but many people believe it. Anti-Semites think this is the magic key to Jewish influence, so they occupy most of their time trying to prove the Holocaust is fiction created out of whole cloth. Thus is the nature of blood feuds.

To be clear, no reasonable person can claim that Jews were not singled out by the Nazis for special treatment. The record is clear on that point. The Nazis also targeted other groups, like Gypsies and Slavs. There is no question that monstrous things happened in the war at the hands of the Germans and their allies. Much of it was the inevitable consequence of war, which is always a monstrous thing. When war is waged on the industrial scale, the results are horrific.

That should be the lesson of the two great industrial wars. The Great War was a blood feud scaled up and decorated with lofty rhetoric. At anytime, the sides could have accepted the futility of their blood feud and crafted a blood peace. Instead, they fought themselves to exhaustion. The Second World War and the horrors that flowed from it were the result of having learned nothing from the last war. Instead, the blood feud between the people of Europe continued and spread to the world.

The reason European societies evolved ways to mitigate the local blood feud or eliminate it entirely is they tended to spiral into mutual destruction. A blood peace was often stronger than one agreed upon out of convenience, for the simple reason both sides suffered real harm to achieve it. Two tribes that lost members over a feud that was eventually settled to the satisfaction of both, had a shared bond that transcended material concerns or present convenience.

Of course, individualizing crime and disputes was the way we eventually eliminated the blood feud entirely. Holding the individual accountable for his crimes and his crimes alone, regardless of the relationship between his group and that of the victim, settled the matter before it could spiral into a feud. When the Lord hangs the murderer, rather than forcing his people to pay the clan of the victim, it changes the relationship between man and tribe, as well the relationship between tribes.

In a way, the criminal code was a preemptive act. When the sovereign steps in to punish the guilty, he is short circuiting the natural tribal reaction. If the law is clear and the sovereign is even handed in his application of it, then the people not only accept his remedies but will seek his remedy before seeking their own justice. This is how the law is supposed to work in what we think of as civil society. At the heart of it is a sense of justice motivated by a desire to keep the peace.

What we see with the hunt for centenarians whose primary crime is of blood is a perversion of this principle. The reason to arrest this old man for crimes that may or may not have happened is to perpetuate a blood feud. There is no justice to be had in these cases, as the events happened so long ago. It is not as if there is a need for an example to discourage others. This is just a tribal cry for vengeance echoing through the corrupted halls of western justice.

Not to put too fine a point on it but look at the other example in the story. “A 96-year-old woman has also been accused of working as a Nazi, as a secretary to the commandant of the Stutthof concentration camp in Poland.” They are going to put on a trial a woman whose crime was having worked for the Nazis. In this case, the tribe crying out for blood is the Poles, who suffered more from the Nazis than any other group. Even so, much blood was spilled to reach a peace, the Poles should accept it.

In the end, this is the test of civilization. Civilized people understand that you must close the books on the past, in order to avoid reliving them. The present is always a story of the past, but it cannot be a nightmare from which we never awake. Disputes are settled and they become a part of the story of a people and that people’s relationship to other people, as part of the blood peace. When one or both sides cannot accept that blood peace, accept the blood of the other as a sacrifice, the result is more blood.

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