The Death Of Fringe

Posted on October 15, 2021 by thezman

While putting the show together, something that came to mind is how people on our side seem to be getting wise to certain things. The old gags are not working, at least not as well as they did in the past. Those coming over the great divide have learned some hard lessons about politics in the process. This is why Conservative Inc. has not been able to spin the events of the last five years into new fundraising. Many people really have caught onto their tricks.

Part of it is a greater awareness of the political grifter. Way back in the Obama years, I would drop the word “grifter” into the comment section of a conservative site and most of the responses were asking me what the term meant. Ten years ago, no one used the term and very few people talked about politics as a confidence game. Today the word grifter is used all the time. There is a much greater awareness of the political conmen and the tricks they play on the unsuspecting.

One result of this is people are less willing to get behind someone who steps forward to present themselves as the next face of the cause. The stories about groups like Proud Boys and Oaf Keepers being run by the FBI has opened a lot of eyes. Increasingly, the default assumption is that whoever the media is trying to elevate is not on the level or is just an agent of the state. The FBI shenanigans over the last five years has made many people into cynics when it comes to activism.

This is an example of unintended consequences. The best tool the system had was to herd normal people into these false alternatives. For generations conservatism was the place where normal people rallied to defend themselves. It never worked, of course, but that was the point. Without the Potemkin movements, it is going to be much more difficult for the system to organize the resistance into dead end causes or have them rally around fraudulent leaders.

It will make genuine organizing more difficult, but that is probably a good thing as it will require better people. If you can easily get a mob together online, and no one cares to check out the people in the mob, it is easy pickings for the bad guys. When an organizer has to work hard to gain trust and build his organization, you get a better class of organizer. He is going to be much more circumspect about the sorts of people he lets into his thing he worked so hard to build.

This is something that happened in Tsarist Russia. There was widespread unhappiness with the system in the middle of the 19th century, but the people organizing against the Tsar were low quality people. It took time to move past that phase and to a place where you had serious men building serious organizations of other serious men. The last decade of the Soviet empire had a similar transition. Perhaps resistance must be born of cynicism for it to be genuine resistance.

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: Why Outsiders Fail
22:00: Examples
42:00: Failure Avoidance

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

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

https://youtu.be/xrEEXX6SJ2g

Lessons From Collapse

Posted on October 14, 2021 by thezman

When the Soviet Union collapsed, it did not descend into chaos or have a long period where no one was in charge. It was a process that began with the power struggle between Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. This power struggle undermined the power of the party and eventually the government. Into the void flowed a new source of power and authority, the oligarchs. These were men with control of key assets who backed Yeltsin’s privatization plans for the economy.

Those oligarchs did not spring from nothing. Some were key party figures who had controlled aspects of the Soviet economy, but most were privateers who operated in the shadow economy of the Soviet system. They held posts in the Soviet system but had extensive contacts in the criminal underground. As the power of the state declined, the power of the underwound economy grew. When the system collapsed, they became the power centers providing control of the country.

This was not unique to the Soviet system. Whenever power begins to wane, alternative centers of power begin to flourish. There is a period in which the real power exists in these distributed power centers, but the façade of the old system remains. Collapse is merely the formal recognition of reality. Germany in the interwar years is another example of what happens when there is a power vacuum. The fascists did not spring from nothing. They had roots in German history and culture.

The Western Roman Empire is probably the best example of the process of collapse and what follows. For a long time, the empire was mostly a fiction. The daily life of the people was controlled by the local powers, the large landowners. These local authorities had power through ownership of land and authority through the administration of the law and regulation of local economics. They even supplied local security in addition to providing men to fight in the legions.

The latifundia was what we would think of today as a plantation. It was the closest thing to agribusiness in the ancient world. It was a large parcel of land worked by slaves for the purpose of export. By the late stages of the empire, these enterprises were common throughout the empire. After the empire, they became the basis of what we understand to be feudalism. The slaves became peasants, and the landowners became the feudal lords controlling the administration of Western Europe.

There was a lot more going on at the end of the Western Roman Empire, but a critical and necessary element was the rise of distributed power centers. Like the ethnic gangsters in the Soviet Union, these agricultural enterprises initially filled in the gaps of the system to keep it functioning. In time they began to rival the power of the empire and when the empire collapsed, they filled the void left behind. The resulting system was built around those local centers of power.

Just as there is a point at which a number of grains of sand becomes a pile of sand, there is a point where the decentralized power centers go from subservient to the central authority to rivaling the central authority. There is a paradox at work in that we can know this point exists but can never identify it with certainty. How many grains of sand constitutes a pile? At what point do people look first to the oligarch for leadership rather than the central authority?

It is a useful question to consider, because there was a point of no return in the Soviet Union just as there was in the Western Roman Empire. Many of those oligarchs in Russia were just the guys who noticed it first. Mikhail Fridman was active in the underground economy in the later years of the Soviet Union and quickly moved to the newly privatized economy as soon as it was possible. Like most of the oligarchs, he was an early adopter who saw the writing on the wall.

In other words, the men who would eventually become the oligarchs after the fall of communism were the first to see that the old system was doomed and something else was coming to replace it. They did not know or care what was coming. They just wanted to profit from the chaos. In fact, when the opportunity arose, they promoted the chaos, backing Yeltsin over Gorbachev because it was good for business. They profited from the collapse before anyone saw the collapse coming.

In current year America, this is relevant because it suggests that the American empire has been in collapse for a long time know. The rise of the financial oligarchs in the late-1980’s and 1990’s was one sign. The rise of Silicon Valley oligarchs as a rival power center to Washington is another. The assault on small business and the middle class by the combined power of the oligarchs and the political class is analogous to the late years of the Soviet system.

In other words, the American empire may already be in collapse. The geezers in Washington are allowed to pretend they are in charge as it benefits the oligarchs, but they have no real power. Legislation is written by the army of scribes known as lobbyists and think tanks, underwritten by the oligarchs. Elections are determined by the money and media supplied by those same oligarchs. The real power lies in boardrooms and villas, while the political system is just a show.

The Soviet and Roman examples suggest such arrangements never last as reality eventually forces its way to the front. In Russia, the oligarchs were brought to heel by the one universal source of power. Vladimir Putin, with the support of the intelligence community and the military was able to reassert civil control of Russia. The oligarchs still exist, but enough have been killed, exiled, or jailed to make sure the rest know who wields the real power in the country.

This is the other shoe to drop in the American empire. The intelligence services have real power, as we saw with the FBI efforts to overturn the 2016 election. The military has real power but lacks real leadership. Their willingness and ability to thwart Trump’s efforts to get out of Syria and Afghanistan should be of concern. Somewhere in the officer ranks there is a man with the skill and desire to change the relationship between the military and the decaying civil control.

Historical analogies are never perfect and are useful only in comparing the broad outlines of times and places. A smooth landing for the empire is not guaranteed any more than Caesarism is a certainty. The military could blunder the empire into a war it cannot win and destroy its credibility in the process. A financial collapse could lead to a popular revolt against the oligarchs. Of course, there is the looming demographic crisis that will bring unimaginable social upheaval.

Even so, what history is telling us is that the American empire is well past the point where reform is possible. It is past the point where the decaying system of imperial control can expect to outlive its current operators. The system is on life support and powerful interests are evolving in response to this reality. The collapse is now certain, but the timing is what is unknown. Another lesson of history here is that no one saw the Soviet collapse coming. The end is always a surprise.

The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

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State Of Fear

Posted on October 13, 2021 by thezman

There are many theories as to why the managerial class of America enthusiastically embraces the nutty social fads. California now has a law requiring “gender neutral” toy aisles in stores, for example. One crazy putting this into a bill is understandable, but why did everyone else go along with it? Why does anyone go along with the loopy idea of gender at all? It is not a real thing. Humans are male and female. Everyone has known this for thousands of years.

This is just one example, but the pattern is always the same. Certainly, some do it out of fear of losing face. The oriental nature of the managerial class is easily missed, but the whole face saving thing is where you see it. That is not a normal quality of Northern European people. It is what you see in a small, tightly knit people, but it is a real thing in our managerial class. They fear being seen as outside the current cultural norms of their class, so everyone plays along.

You can really tell this when you run into someone who is in the habit of announcing her pronouns in her workplace. The low level people are most prone to peer pressure, so they jump on these fads with as much enthusiasm as they can muster. The trouble is she still interacts with normal people. When she breaks out the pronouns around a normal, she has the look you see with people struggling with mental illness. She is not sure if what she is saying is what she is thinking.

This is how a minority within the managerial class is able to exert so much power over the rest of the class. That California requirement on toy aisles is no doubt the product of a lone crazy, but fear of exclusion prevented everyone else from speaking out against an obviously insane idea. No one wants to be the one who is seen rejecting the morality of the whole. In a world where the most insane ideas get embraced, who wants to risk opposing this nutty idea?

Even so, the managerial system selects for conformity, but it also allows for the crazies who cook up these ideas. In other words, it selects for a conformity that makes exception for anti-social behavior and it selects for people who are always looking to undermine the dominant culture. Put another way, the personality type most prized is the sadistic subversive with a passion for enforcement. The most perverted people are the most highly regarded in our ruling class.

Another angle to this, perhaps, is that the general belief system of the managerial class is highly conformist. The reason is the people at the top have no natural authority to legitimize their positions. The result is a rigid culture that allows for very little creativity and originality. The exception is when it comes to offending the normal people of society, which is what separates the managerial class from everyone else. You can be weird as long as it offends the normals.

The resulting culture is one that is extremely intolerant of deviation, yet desperate for innovated ways to undermine tradition. The reason these cultural fads are increasingly ridiculous is they are running out of things to smash. When you have already put gay men in jock straps on parade floats and made everyone remain silent about it, finding something more offensively ridiculous is not easy. They jumped on drag queen story hour out of desperation for something new.

The austere conformity is not seen by those who operate outside the domains of the Cloud People, so the quiet desperation is not obvious. Venture inside and what will be most striking is the humorlessness. People smile and laugh a little, but there is an uncanny valley quality to it. They laugh like people who read about how humans laugh from time to time. Say something intended as a joke and they will look at one another for permission to laugh at what the alien said.

The state of fear within the managerial class cannot be underestimated. The ritualized sacrifice of that football coach over his heresy is not intended for the Dirt People the NFL preys upon. That was for the Cloud People. In a world where ritualized human sacrifice is accepted as normal, fear of violating the rules, even by accident, is a very real concern for these people. The threat of exile works the same as Stalin’s gulag worked in the Soviet Union.

This is why no one in the media ever asks the obvious questions when the various talking robots are put out for question and answer periods. A group of normal people in the White House press room would cause the face plate of Jen Psaki to fall off by coordinating their questions and tangling her up in her lies. This never happens because normals are never allowed inside. The people allowed inside know they can easily be replaced by actors if they get out of line.

That was the point of the Kamala Harris video. Not only did they use child actors, but Harris also clearly performed like a well-trained actress. To normal people it is just more evidence that these people are sociopaths and liars. Inside the world of politics, it is a message. There are plenty of unemployed actors willing to play politician, reporter and so on, so make sure you know your lines before filming. Democracy is just the theater portion of the managerial system that rules America.

A ruling class rooted in fear of deviation but permitted to undermine that which makes their existence possible is not one that can last. We are seeing this with the growing economic crises. No one dares suggest anything other than what is being done, so they are frozen in place, hoping for a miracle. The Afghanistan debacle is another example of how extreme conformity results in disaster. No one dared question the plan or adjust it on the fly, so the plan just slammed into the rocks of reality.

The is the crisis of today. The ossified geezer class at the top of the system have insulated themselves against all possible reform. They rule their system through fear and manufactured consent. The only relief for the people in it is the orchestrated subversions like gender neutral toy aisles. Like starving men fighting for crumbs, they jump at these opportunities at something resembling life. Subversion is the bit of sunlight that comes through their prison windows.

The Microcosm Of Sport

Posted on October 12, 2021 by thezman

Like most things in the current age, professional sport has become a degenerate mockery of itself. The presentation is a high-tech vaudeville act that is now mostly advertisements and propaganda. The people in charge of the various sports are the worst this age can muster. The participants are vulgar carnies. Despite the best efforts of this age, however, sport continues to provide an insight into our times. It is a microcosm of the larger society in which it operates.

For example, football was always the second sport in America, up until the explosion of mass media in the 1980’s. In fact, football was probably behind sports like boxing and horse racing, not just baseball. The explosion of television rocketed football to the top of sport entertainment because it was a natural for the medium. It provides a stage that fits the screen, has breaks for ad space and is a weekly happening. The NFL quickly became a lightly scripted television sports drama.

The mass media culture made the NFL in particular, and football in general, the king of the sports entertainment industry. Like the culture as a whole, the apparent success of the league masks the problems. Ownership has given way to a class of mercurial operators with no loyalty to the local communities. Their greed has resulted in a steady decline in the product. While ratings have seen a boost so far this year, general interest has been in decline for the last decade.

A big reason for that is the product. Kids are not playing football at the youth level, like they used to, so the number of young males moving through the system is in decline, meaning that the quality of player has declined. You see that with the quarterback position, which is the most challenging. The sudden decline in the number of white kids playing youth ball means a decline in the positions requiring smarts. One result is the position has become more “athletic”.

Of course, modernity destroys social capital, and youth sports are the canary in the coal mine when it comes to social cohesion. When America was based on strong white communities, it had lots of white fathers volunteering to coach sports, run youth leagues and so on. As the white population declines, white volunteers decline. As society becomes more diverse, which brings deracination and alienation, the organic structures that make youth sports possible decline.

The men running the sport are not concerned about that as they are not the sort to invest in society. They just assume they can pack up their stuff and move onto the next society once all the life from this one has been drained. These are post-Americans who operate as pirates. Like the global economy that spawned them, they ride the waves of globalism. America is just the place where they can operate at the moment, a pirate’s cove that means nothing to them.

The NFL is also riddled with scandal. Its team in Washington is owned by a degenerate who is one scandal after another. To distract from the latest scandal, DEA agents raiding their facilities, the league instructed their media to focus on manufactured crises involving coaches. For a while, the media was obsessing over the coach of the Jacksonville franchise. They keep making up stories about him, relying on imaginary sources and manufactured internet chatter.

The coach of the league’s Las Vegas franchise was just forced to resign when it was learned he held normal opinions about gays and blacks. His e-mails magically appeared in the media just when the DEA came calling. It was an orchestrated hit, probably with the help of that team’s owner, in order to get out of paying the contract. It could also be part of the effort to distract from the looming narcotics scandal. The DEA does not raid famous people because of a paperwork discrepancy.

This stuff is a microcosm of the ruling class. They got these e-mails from a previous investigation of their Washington team. Then they used those e-mails from that prior scandal to distract attention from the current scandal. Those e-mails were handed to a reporter, who did not bother to mention the source of them. Once the coach addressed the issue another batch of e-mails was delivered to the New York Times. They did not mention their source either. Imagine that.

Like the political media, the sports media is owned by the system. They are the ministry of truth blasting out what the league tells them to say. If one of them gets froggy and does genuine reporting, he is dismissed from his post. YouTube and Twitter are full of people who would be happy to play the role of jock sniffer. Everyone in the ministry of truth knows this, so they play along. To borrow a phrase from Theodore Dalrymple, the media is a collection of emasculated liars.

Right there is the last five years of Washington politics. The system manufacturing fake scandals in order to hide real scandals. The media, which still claims to be impartial observers, plays along because they have not choice. They are servants. The result is the real crimes get pushed to the shadows, while nonsense stories fill the air, often used to discredit people asking too many questions. This is rule by sociopath. It is a reflection of the ruling class as a whole.

The Gruden affair is a perfect moment to see the reality of this age. He is a person who holds normal opinions about things like race and gays. In private he talks like what normal people would expect from a sports coach. He is being hurled into the void on a morality charge by people who lie on spec. The relatively normal guy is condemned by the carny trash as morally unfit. That’s America in a nutshell. Our moral arbiters are vulgar degenerates and sociopaths.

The problems we see with professional sports in America reflect the problems of the West in general. Sport is a Western thing. Other people compete in small ways, but organized sporting activity is part of European man. There is a reason there is no equivalent of the NFL in Africa. Big time sports need big time societies and those societies will always be European societies. The other people of the world simply lack the capacity to produce these cultural artifacts.

As the West declines, sport has now declined with it. The people running pro sports, active in the destruction of the West, are operating under the delusion that they can survive the decline of Western people. In fact, many are driven by a desire to create a post-European world. This is what you see everywhere in the ruling class. You also see that it is unsustainable. Without the necessary human capital, these manifestations of Western culture cannot last and they will not last.

Fruit Of The Poisoned Tree

Posted on October 11, 2021 by thezman

Note: The Monday Taki column is up. The topic this week is the increasingly familiar and obvious Jim Snow laws of America. Behind the green door we have the weekly Sunday podcast where I rant and rave about the world.

In every form of human organization there are layers of responsibility. The simplest way of expressing it is that at the top there is always the boss who is the guy making the important decisions for the organization. Everyone else, in one fashion or another, takes orders from the boss and carries out the orders. Always at the bottom are people who just do what they are told. The vertical arrangements are one of the truths of work life that everyone just accepts without much thought.

More formally, at the top layer of an organization, like a business, are the big decision makers for the organization. Below them are the policy makers. They take the big initiative and turn it into rules and plans. Below them are the people who make those rules and plans into reality. This is the layer most people inside and outside the organization see. They instruct the bottom layer of the organization, train them and making sure they follow through on their orders.

The important part of this arrangement is that everyone in the organization understands their role within the organization. The private in a rifle platoon has to understand that his role is to follow the orders given him by is squad leader or platoon leader. His job is not to determine strategy or decide on objectives. Similarly, the guy on the shop floor has to know his duty is to perform the role he is assigned at a workstation. Otherwise, the organization breaks down and fails to operate as intended.

At the bottom this is rarely a problem, as the people at the bottom are well aware of their status in the hierarchy. The people at the top, of course, know they are at the top of the hierarchy and what that means. The trouble comes in the middle layers where the people tend to be the most ambitious and most prone to overstepping their bounds, hoping to impress the boss. They can also be overly cautious, fearful of getting blamed for doing something wrong and losing status in the organization.

This is where the culture of the organization plays a decisive role. A company with a good corporate culture will have a management layer full of people who not only know their roles but embrace them in the context of the larger organization. A good military culture is one where the officers respect the chain of command, but also understand mission priorities and the need to improvise when necessary. Good organizational culture is what makes or breaks an organization.

This is also where we see the inherent problem of democracy. The basic premise of democratic systems is one man one vote. That means every vote is equal, which is another way of saying that every opinion is equally valid. In the political sense, it means the opinion of the bum counts the same as the opinion of the businessman who volunteers at the church on weekends. The bum’s vote counts for the same as the vote of the man committed to his community.

Democracy flies in the face of everything we know about human organization, because it rejects the natural hierarchy we see everywhere. Worse yet, it gnaws away at the basic understanding of human relations. Those middle-managers in a well-run company are happy to be in their roles. They may have ambition, but they also accept reality and know that their ambitions are linked to that reality. The morality of democracy undermines the very basis of their relationship to the whole.

This is why modern democracies are full of people confused about their place in society as well as the role others play. There is a whole genre of videos on-line where people confront store managers about things no reasonable person should expect them to know or control. We have the opposite, as well, where people at the lowest ranks of management carry on like they are shot callers, pushing people around and going well beyond the limits of their role.

Imagine a factory where everyone thinks they should have a say in what the factory makes and how much they make of it. The guy who cleans the workstations gets the same vote as the sales manager and the plant manager. Imagine a platoon where the men vote on their missions and collectively decide on their targets. It sounds like madness because it is madness. That factory would go out of business in a hurry and that military unit would quickly become a criminal gang.

This is, however, how the West has decided to run their societies. Now, it is true that the real shot callers hide in the shadows, using the institutions to manipulate public opinion and coerce people into their positions. They do so, however, while promoting the idea that everyone’s opinion is the same and every opinion counts. On the one hand they promote chaos, while on the other they try to maintain order. It is no wonder that the liberal democracies are shaking themselves to pieces.

The temptation is to blame the internet for allowing the stupid to have easy access to the public square, but in reality, the internet is just a facilitator. According to the tenets of democracy, Twitter is the goal, not a terrible accident. Imagine the town square full of howling lunatics and you get the prefect image of democracy. Social media made real is a public riot but is also exactly what you get when everyone stops accepting their role in the hierarchy and thinks they are a king.

Fundamentally, all forms of democracy are as hostile and contrary to the nature of man as all forms of communism. Both communism and democracy assume something about people that can never be true. That is, all men are equal. This is obviously false in the simplest organization and even more so in the most complex. Just as communism has always ended in disaster, democracy has always ended in murder. Both delusions are the fruit of the same poison tree named equality.

Economic Stuff

Posted on October 8, 2021 by thezman

If you look back to the early days of this site, a lot of what I posted was about economics or government economic policy. These days, it is rare that the topic comes up unless it is in references to communism. In fact, economics is no longer a big topic of discussion anywhere, even with the silly libertarians. It comes up, of course, but it is no longer the big issue. Up until recent, economics was the centerpiece of conservatism and their brief against their alleged opponents.

Thirty years ago, the big change in politics was Bill Clinton using the catchphrase, “It’s the economy stupid” to attack George Bush. From then on, official politics was about taxes and fiscal policy. It was all a show, of course, but it framed the political debate and turned economists into TV stars. The site Marginal Revolution was a big deal for a while because Tyler Cowen was a star economist. Today the site is covered in tumbleweeds because no one cares about libertarian economics anymore.

Even now with the economy having problems at the retail end, people are more focused on the less tangible stuff like CRT or Covid policy. The massive Build Back Better bill stuck in Congress gets little attention. Regime media talks about it as a magic elixir so the crazies have something to chant, but otherwise they have left it alone. Twenty years ago, Conservative Inc would have been organizing a campaign against it, but today they cannot generate much interest in the thing.

One reason for this is that people have come to realize that caring about the economy, tax policy or government programs changes nothing. Those who vote Republican have come to terms with the fact that none of the things they want in terms of taxes and spending will ever happen, so they have lost interest. The far-left still dreams of the socialist paradise, but it is mostly a show of piety. Medicare-for-all may as well be unicorns-for-all and they probably know it.

It used to be an axiom of politics that a good economy was good for incumbents, but the strong economy was of no use to Trump in 2020. He tried to talk about the stock market and jobs for black people, but no one cared about those things. What mattered was his personality and how the righteous felt about it. With Biden, the issue is his growing dementia and the weirdness of this administration. They built a fake Oval Office for him to do live shots for some reason. Why do that?

The lesson here is that if caring about something makes no difference, people will eventually stop caring about it. Caring about immigration, for example, does nothing to change policy, so eventually people will stop caring about it too. You can run through all the issues this way and before long you get to the point where caring who wins the next election no longer matters. That’s why politics is getting so personals. It is the only thing people can care about, so they care about personalities.

Even so, economics still matters. If the economy turns sour, people will care about economics, if only in a general sense. The Cloud People have big plans for the post-human economic order, so it is worth discussing. This week, the show is about some of the issues that come up in dissident circles related to economics. A little change of pace from the normal ranting and raving about the culture. A call back to the days of green eyeshade conservatism.

This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00: Opening
02:00: Supply Chains
17:00 Build Back Better
37:00 Money Trouble

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

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

https://youtu.be/qOdA2Hoj5Ko

The Old Circus

Posted on October 7, 2021 by thezman

One of the things you can count on, one of the universal constants of American politics, is the Republicans will always find a way to save the Democrats from whatever mess they have created for themselves. It is the reason the Republican party exists. They are the guys at the back of the circus parade with shovels. They scoop up what gets plopped onto the streets by the Left. The main job of the GOP is making sure the suckers in the suburbs never lose faith in the system.

We have an example of how this works with the Build Back Better scheme the Democrats have been working on for six months. They don’t have the votes to pass it on their own under the normal procedures and many of their own members are worried that it will make them unemployed. Not everyone in plutocracy is onboard with the Great Break the radicals have planned. Therefore some Democratic pols have been instructed by their owners to oppose it.

The squabbling between the far-left crazies, close to half the House Democratic caucus at this point, and the slightly-less-crazy members has resulted in a deadlock. The Inner Party cannot find a way to get agreement on passing the Build Back Better bill or agreement on kicking it down the road. Worse yet, they have to raise the debt limit to avoid a government shutdown. They either need the Republicans to help them raise the debt ceiling or they need a deal with the crazies.

Just as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, here comes the Republican Party to the rescue, offering to help them raise the debt ceiling. You see, it is against conservative principles to let the government shutdown, so the Republicans will graciously give the other side all the time they need to hammer out their great restructuring of American society. They are waving this around as a victory, claiming they owned the libs or some such nonsense.

Now, none of this matters all that much as the Republican Party is just an ornament to decorate the system. They have no power and no desire to exercise power even if permitted to wield it. That should have been made clear during the Bush years when they had control of both houses and the White House for six years. Instead of doing anything they promised for generations, they did the exact opposite. It was the least “conservative” period since the Johnson administration.

Of course, the Obama years and the Trump years should have made clear to even the dumbest white person on the municipal golf course that voting for the Republicans is a statement against interest. The party got the majority in the House after 2010 and remained rolled up in a ball until Obama left town. When Trump arrived, they sprang into action to block his every move. Then they threw the 2018 House elections to make sure the Trump administration got nothing done.

That is the good news about the current circus in Washington. No one seems to care all that much other than the crazies on the Left. Trump is holding rallies and people are attending, but he is not talking about the circus in DC. The mouth-breathers in Conservative Inc. have tried to get people interested in this issue, but the rest homes have been quiet. It looks like Covid has wiped out most of their supporters, those unwilling to wake up to the reality of the racket.

Even regime media is struggling to pretend this is interesting. They can’t figure out how to attack the freaky left-wing Senator from Arizona, who is one of the senators holding up the works. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) ticks many identity boxes, so they have to tread lightly with her. Joe Manchin is just a Republican playing Democrat, so they can’t do anything with him either. The fact is, the regime media is overrun with kooks now, so they are not very good at selling the party message.

Prior stand-offs over the debt ceiling and the budget have been big news, but this one has no interest, suggesting that there has been a change in sentiment. One possible reason for that is many normal people are now fully aware that they had been throwing their vote away on Republicans. They may hate Biden and chant his name at public events, but they are no longer Republican by default. They will support Trump as a symbol of their team, but that is as far as it goes.

That could be good news. On the other hand, the lack of media hype about this fight in Washington could be a sign the system is fully aware. That is, they now realize they can operate in spite of public opinion. People who gladly went along with bizarre mandates like mask wearing and accepted the 2020 election are not going to be fertilizing the tree of liberty anytime soon. If you have an unlimited supply of imaginary voters and no one cares, then why pretend public opinion matters?

Both things can be true at the same time, so that may be what we are seeing with this edition of the political drama. The old Red Team – Blue Team politics of the last thirty years has finally run out of road. What replaces it remains to be seen, but watching octogenarians play a pointless game of legislative chess is no longer what engages the general public. The supporters of Red Team may have finally wised up and the supporters of Blue Team just want their stuff.

Either way, it is a probably good sign. The best thing that could happen for normal Americans is that the Republican Party dissolved. Once the fight is purely “us and them” with the latter part being the people running the system, regardless of label, then a genuine politics is possible. As long as normal people have the escape hatch of compromise, they will always take it. If the disinterest in this is the prelude to disillusionment, then things can get interesting again.

Emotional Appropriation

Posted on October 6, 2021 by thezman

One of the weird aspects of this age is how important people appropriate the emotions and feeling of others and make them their own. They will make statements about their feelings on a subject, but those feelings are not really their feelings because they cannot actually be experiencing the feelings in questions. Our Cloud People have normalized emotional appropriation as a way of projecting to the Dirt People that they have genuine human emotions.

The easy example here is the public person who has a rare moment of honesty and posts what they really think on Twitter. This sets off the familiar drama on-line in which people rush to their favorite platform to express their outrage. The fact that they have no reason to care, much less be outraged, goes unnoticed. Eventually, the director of this drama tells the star to waddle out on stage and issue an apology. In that apology, the star claims to feel things that cannot be felt.

For example, they always say something about feeling remorse for the pain they have caused, despite the fact this is impossible. You can feel remorse for causing harm to an actual human, but not for anonymous zombies on-line. Further, the people claiming to have been harmed were not harmed. In fact, the opportunity to play along in the drama was the highlight of their day, maybe their life. Like the famous people, they got to appropriate the feelings of others.

None of the emotions expressed in these offense-apology dramas can be real, because it does not involve real victims or real offenses. The star of these shows often says, “I apologize to those I have offended” but the statement itself says they are not sure who they could have offended. You can only apologize to real humans to whom you have committed real harm. An apology to imaginary people is an imaginary apology for an imaginary harm. It is all just emotional appropriation.

A recent example of this is the football coach caught dancing with a woman not his wife after a football game. For some reason, football fans were “outraged” as if we have suddenly been thrust into Victorian times. The owner of the team that employs the coach was scandalized, calling it “inexcusable”. The coach then apologized to imaginary people for something no one, other than maybe his wife, should have an interest, much less an emotional investment.

Another common example of emotional appropriation is the Cloud Person taking pride in something that does not exist. Politicians will talk about different communities, for example, as if they are rural villages with a well-defined character. The “trans community” is a current favorite. The politicians will claim to be proud of their support for the trans community. You cannot take pride in something you had no part in creating and you cannot be proud of something that does not exist.

Pride, ironically enough, is one of the most important emotions for our modern emotional appropriators. College presidents are always talking about how proud they are of their community. They are just hired fundraisers who drift from job to job, never creating anything but trouble. Yet, they will take pride in the work of others as if they had a hand in it. The fixation on the sin of pride by the Cloud People is one of those things that reveals much about our age.

The sin of pride, for those deprived of proper religious training, is considered a rebellion against God. The person committing this sin attributes to himself the honor and glory that is due to another, usually God. Since our Cloud People worship the arc of history, it sort of makes sense that they inappropriately take pride in that which is the product of generations of history. Pride has been called the cancer of the soul. It is considered the first and most serious of the deadly sins.

One reason for these weird public displays of emotion is that we have shifted from a male dominated culture to a female dominated one. Maintaining a stiff upper lip, especially in public, is a male attribute. Women, on the other hand, have always been encouraged to show emotion. This is why all public people feel a need to show emotion in public. It is how they project their piety. In order to gain status, you must show how much you care, which often means blubbering in public.

Another issue here, though, is the people who now dominate public life are not capable of real human emotion. They don’t do things, for example, for which they could take genuine pride. They don’t have a concern for the welfare of others. This is the age of the public sociopath. Caring about real people is a sucker’s play in this age, so the ambitious try to avoid it. The result is we get these weird dramas where the Cloud People appropriate the emotions of others.

In the novel Brave New World, humans in the imagined future went to something called the Feelies, which was a theater-like experience. They would be simulated to feel strong emotions via the use of various inputs. The people went to these things to feel things like grief and anger, because they had no way of experiencing these emotions in their regular lives. The combination of their genetic engineering and taking the happiness-producing drug called Soma blocked normal emotions.

Something similar happens today. The Cloud People are mostly sociopaths at this point, incapable of having normal human emotions. The general population, however, has been plucked from normal human community and thrust into a synthetic solution of consumerism that does not allow for the normal human experience. In order to keep the system running, the Cloud People are constantly creating synthetic emotions they can display and use to stimulate emotion in the Dirt People.

This is the appeal of mass media in general and social media in particular. Just look at the name “social media”. It is a replacement for the normal human socialization that would occur in natural human communities. The most emotionally unstable people are intensely on-line. They lack the normal structure of human community to keep them balanced so they seek an alternative on their phone. The result is a population on a roller-coaster of emotional appropriation.

Emotion is not much different from what comes from taking stimulants. The first hit is the best hit. The most intense emotions we feel in our lives are at the extremes, so the emotionalism of this age grows more intense. Public emotion in a liberal democracy is the opiate of the people. Therefore the emotional appropriation becomes more prolific and the drama more intense. We are shaking ourselves to pieces in an effort to feel that which has been normal for the life of man.

The Escapists

Posted on October 5, 2021 by thezman

One of the things about liberal democracy that is hard to see from the inside is how the system must be all consuming. The people trapped in such a system are forced to engage with it constantly. You are not allowed to live outside of politics. Everywhere you go there are people preaching the latest gospel, demanding you engage with it, usually demanding you not only have an opinion, but you have the right opinion. There is no escape from politics, because politics is everywhere.

The reason for this is democracy can only derive its authority from the general will, which must be expressed through public opinion. That is the basis of all democratic systems of government. Truth itself is fifty percent plus one. If people refuse to participate by not voting or not having an opinion, they must be assumed to be in the opposition to whatever is being proposed. Democracy off all kinds is a binary system where you can only be for or against the current issue.

You may not want to engage in the current issues because you simply don’t care, but your lack of caring can only be read as opposition. After all, if you supported the latest fad, you would make that clear. Your indifference gives support to those who oppose it, so your reasons are unimportant. What matters is your indifference is standing in the way of the cause. Both sides, therefore, feel it is their duty to force you to pick a side, as otherwise you are on the other side.

This binary view of the world that is forced on everyone inside a liberal democracy is a form of totalitarianism. The conventional definition of a totalitarian system is one that exercises an extremely high degree of control over public and private life. The merely authoritarian system seeks only to control the state. Totalitarian systems seek to change the world and human nature with total control of public and private life. Man in a totalitarian system is a prisoner of enforced consent.

In contrast to the masculine nature of communist systems, liberal democracy is a softer and more subtle expression of control. The old communists would send men around to beat nonconformists. Millions were sent off to die in camps because they needed to be examples to the others. In liberal democracy, there is the same need for examples, but instead of torture and murder, the system uses psychological weapons against the intended victims. They get nagged into submission.

We see this with the Covid cult. In the Soviet Union, citizens would have been dragged off to get their shots and that would have been the end of it. There would be no need for vaccine passports, as internal passports were compulsory. In liberal democracy, the system seeks to nag and torment people into compliance. It is a passive-aggressive assault on the mind of the citizen. You are told you have choices, but if you choose incorrectly you are tormented by the system.

Note also that the point of compliance in liberal democracy is the same as in the communists forms of totalitarianism. Compliance is a moral issue. No one in charge cares about the health of the people. In fact, they secretly hope the white population dies from Covid. What matters to them is that you agree. They need your affirmation because they get their sense of authority from the general will. No matter your reasons, you not getting the vaccine is viewed as rejection of their morality.

This fear of and intolerance for opposition is the hallmark of totalitarian regimes and it is the operating ethos of modern liberal democracy. It is why the system has become entangled with digital life. It allows them to search for what the Soviets called refuseniks, people who refused to agree with the system. In liberal democracy, the refusenik is a “denier” of some sort or possibly a conspiracy theorist. The search for such people using digital tools is the highest priority.

The term “conspiracy theorist” is instructive. History is full of conspiracies, and these are taught in the schools. One of the most famous is the conspiracy to assassinate Julius Caesar by Roman senators. It is used as the archetypal example of the political conspiracy. Despite the fact that conspiracies are the norm in human history, a person who traffics in them is anathematized as a dangerous weirdo. More important, anyone questioning official dogma is called a conspiracy theorist.

This is all part of the central demand of liberal democracy. Like all totalitarian systems, it cannot tolerate deviation or doubt. The authority of the people in charge is dependent on the general will. That is not only what puts them in charge, but it provides the systems of power they control. The indifferent in some small way question this moral authority by withholding their consent. This is why in a liberal democracy; you can never escape politics. You are only permitted to agree.

It is also why the liberal democrat has a special loathing of those who are indifferent to their moral claims. The person who mocks or dismisses their morality is assumed to worship different gods and have a different moral code. His source of strength is outside the liberal democratic order. That person is the true danger because he carries with him an alternative truth. That alternative truth is a direct threat to the system and the people who control it, so it must be destroyed.

This is why Christianity collapsed in the West as liberal democracy was imposed on it by the America empire. Christianity places the ultimate authority, the basis of right and wrong, outside of politics. To allow such an alternative source of morality is impossible in the liberal democratic order. As a result, all forms of Christianity have been swept from the public square. This is why Muslims reject liberal democracy. They know it is a direct threat to their faith.

Perhaps the most important innovation in the realm of totalitarianism is the lure of popular participation. In the communist systems, the party was supreme. In the liberal democratic order, the system attempts to draw everyone in with the promise that they can change things by participating. This flushes the opponents out into the open, who foolishly take the bait. This is the main role of mass media. They promise to amplify your opposition, but only serve to identify you as a heretic.

The Soviet Union made the great turn into decline when it began to run out of enemies it could use to focus party efforts. Once the people figured out that they could only live in the shadows and must always avoid engaging in politics publicly, the system was starved for energy. It settled into a long period of decline and eventually collapsed when faced with the crisis of the 1980’s. Convenient opposition, the handy heretic, is the fuel that powers the totalitarian system.

In a liberal democracy, a genuine opposition will refuse to engage the system and seek to live in the shadows. It will stay off the official social media platforms and avoid all contact with regime media. It will evolve its own language and its own moral structures outside of and independent from the system. The modern dissident will not stand athwart history yelling “stop”. He will stand outside of it, going about his business, building an alternative that is free from the bloody grasp of liberal democracy.

Cloud People Loathing

Posted on October 4, 2021 by thezman

Note: The weekly Taki column is up. This one did not come out very well, but even the best have their off-days. I could not quite figure out where I wanted to go with the analogy, so it went nowhere. Maybe I’ll revisit it here this week. The Sunday show is up behind the green door for those with a soul.

A feature of the ongoing crisis in America is people realizing that things they assumed to be true are not what they had always assumed. The so-called red-pilling or awakening is usually related to the egalitarian issues, but it can also be about general politics, as we saw in 2016. Many rank-and-file conservatives discovered that professional conservatives were not what they claimed. Their attacks on Trump and populism were an awakening for many normal people.

Another part of the great awakening is the realization that things make much more sense if you start from the assumption that the people in charge are motivated by a hatred for normal people. The pointless and punitive measures with regards to Covid has opened a lot of eyes. The people in charge seem to be sitting around dreaming up ways to hassle people, using Covid as an excuse. The pandemic has been a two year party for the sadists among the ruling class.

You really see this with the so-called conservatives, who have evolved into nothing but a cult of loathing. That loathing is directed at the sorts of people they used to trick into supporting them. This is most likely connected, in part, to the fact that so many of the former suckers have wised up over the last five years. The Trump phenomenon broke the spell and there is no way the former suckers are going to go back to being conned by the grifters of Conservative Inc.

The glaring example here is the revolt of the neocons, who broke with Conservative Inc, and have now migrated back to their old home on the Left. Jonah Goldberg, who started out in life fetching coffee for the far-left crank Ben Wattenberg, is pretty much a middle of the road lefty now. Bill Kristol is openly supporting far-left candidates like Terry McAuliffe in Virginia. When you see Bush flunkies in bed with Clinton flunkies, it is not hard to see that conservatism was always a grift.

That is the thing about a grifter. They despise the person they are trying to scam, which is why they can be so ruthless. The grifter does not rip-off everyone. They target a mark and then use all of their powers to harm him, often just for the fun of it. People who have studied the confidence man have noted that the conman always feels like he is in the right and the mark somehow deserves it. You see that with the neocons, who cry out as they strike at the people they conned for so long.

Another example of this conservative loathing for normal people is this post from the corpulent Kevin Williamson. For a long time, his grift was to be the common man at National Review, where he wrote about the little people. Unlike the rest of that crowd, he was not the product of elite universities and connected families. He was from West Texas and flunked out of a state college. His job in Conservative Inc. was to be the populist affirmation of the latest conservative fads.

Conservatives are supposed to “stand athwart” this sort of corruption of the law by the Left, but here you have Williamson celebrating it. The reason is Alex Jones is associated with Donald Trump and populism. In other words, his hatred for the people who used to read him counts for everything. If it means goofball judges promoting nonsense lawsuits that undermine public order, Williamson is for it as long as it harms the people he loves to hate.

Kevin Williamson is a good example of how the loathing of normal people is linked to a deep self-loathing. He is famously obese. He often looks like one of those people who paramedics have to use a flatbed truck to transport to the hospital. The morbidly obese are driven by self-loathing. They eat to get the momentary hit that comes from high calorie foods, but this also fuels the self-loathing. The more they eat the more they hate themselves for it. The morbidly obese have a death wish.

Another reason that guys like Williamsons and David French, another good example, are so blatant in their hatred for normal people is they have always had to play the role of the Dirt Person for their masters in the rackets. They used to make Williamson, for example, dress like a rag-picker when he went on television. You see, he was playing the lucky dirtball, allowed to live in the master’s house, as long as he was a good boy and did what he was told. It is a degrading existence.

This is why he is obsessed with hating Trump and those associated with him. The 2016 election put the lie to his existence. He was just a houseboy for mediocrities like Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru. Imagine having to call them sir when out in public and you can see why Williamson is filled with rage. You also see why he drowns it in processed foods and invective aimed at normal people. He hates you because you remind him of why he hates himself and why he should hate himself.

No life is without some purpose and the purpose of these people has been to open the eyes of normal people about the reality of conservatism. Millions of people have realized over the last five years that these people are liars and crooks. Conservatism was always just a con. Like all conmen, the various characters of Conservative Inc. were motivated by a deep hatred for their marks. Like the rest of the Cloud People, they are defined by their loathing for the Dirt People.

It is this awakening that has put those rackets into crisis. Rich Lowry was finally demoted from his position. Daily management of National Review has now been outsourced to Bangalore. Massive pay cuts and layoffs hang over the entire enterprise now that the suckers have smartened up. A big part of this great awakening is that people are figuring out that it all makes sense when you realize that the people in charge hate you. Your only choice is to hate them back.

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